Queen Esther
A Novel
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Descripción editorial
For readers or moviegoers familiar with The Cider House Rules, a beloved character reappears in Queen Esther. Dr. Wilbur Larch is younger than you remember him, and the unadopted orphans at St. Cloud’s are a different cast of characters—Esther Nacht, a Viennese-born Jew, among them.
After forty years, John Irving revisits the setting of his classic novel, The Cider House Rules—the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, where a Jewish girl, not yet four, is abandoned one winter night.
Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine; anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In the orphanage at St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr. Larch that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish; she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; he won’t find any family who’ll adopt her.
When Esther is fourteen, about to become a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows—a philanthropic family with a history of providing foster care for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and like-minded prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. While she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther never stops loving and protecting the Winslows—not even in Vienna.
In the final chapter of this historical novel—set in Jerusalem, in 1981—Esther Nacht is seventy-six.
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Irving revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules with a baggy novel about a Viennese Jewish orphan and her adoptive family in New Hampshire. Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905 and loses her father to pneumonia during the family's passage across the Atlantic when she is two. She and her mother, Hanna, settle in Portland, Maine, where Hanna is killed by an antisemite when Esther is three. Esther then winds up in the orphanage run by Dr. Wilbur Larch, a character from Cider House, before she's adopted as a teen by the tolerant and patrician Thomas Winslow and his wife. In the late 1930s, Esther travels to Jerusalem and aids a Zionist paramilitary group. After Israel's independence in 1948, she becomes involved with the Israeli Defense Forces and engages in heroic exploits well into her 70s. Long stretches of the novel are devoted to her biological son, Jimmy, who is raised by Thomas's daughter, and grows up to become a novelist. It's tough to find a clear through line, and Irving sidetracks the proceedings for extended digressions into the history of circumcision and other matters. There's fun to be had in his bawdy wordplay, however, as when Jimmy, visiting Thomas in the hospital after a stroke, misunderstands a nurse's use of the word "labile" and "imagine his unfortunate grandfather as emotionally vaginal." Unfortunately, such moments are too few and far between to save this jumbled tale.
