On Division
A Novel
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4.2 • 28 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
** Winner of the 2020 Jewish Fiction Award **
“A novel of wisdom and uncertainty, of love in its greater and lesser forms, and of the struggle between how it should be and how it is. It is impossible not to be moved.”
—Amy Bloom, author of White Houses
"This book brings the reader into the heart of a close-knit Jewish family and their joys, loves, and sorrows . . . A marvelous book by a masterful writer.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife
"As beautiful as it is unexpected.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
Through one woman's life at a moment of surprising change, the award-winning author Goldie Goldbloom tells a deeply affecting, morally insightful story and offers a rare look inside Brooklyn's Chasidic community
On Division Avenue, just a block or two up from the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second. She and Yidel, a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year, live on the third. Wed when Surie was sixteen, they have a happy marriage and a full life, and, at the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two, they are looking forward to some quiet time together.
Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It is a shock. And at her age, at this stage, it is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. She feels exposed, ashamed. She is unable to share the news, even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life, she has a secret—a secret that slowly separates her from the community.
Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It is a shock. And at her age, at this stage, it is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. She feels exposed, ashamed. She is unable to share the news, even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life, she has a secret—a secret that slowly separates her from the community.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A secret sparks a path toward self-discovery in Goldbloom's revelatory latest (after The Paperbark Shoe), set amid the Hasidic community in contemporary Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. At 57, Surie Eckstein is the mother of 10 children, a grandmother to 32, and is about to become a great-grandmother for the first time. Then she discovers that she is pregnant with twins. Surie is ashamed to reveal her pregnancy, lest she be judged for maintaining a sexual relationship with her husband long past customary childbearing age; she feels she can't even reveal her secret to her husband, Yidel, a prominent scribe. Surie fears that Yidel's desire to maintain the family's reputation previously harmed by their son Lipa's estrangement from their family and community might cause him to shun the babies, or Surie herself. Instead of turning toward her community for support, then, Surie looks outside it, beginning to imagine a different future for herself and for some of the younger women in her life: "Instead of her usual terror, there was this new thing, a cautious curiosity about the world." Goldbloom writes about Surie's community fondly but also critically, examining both the kindness and the intolerance that can arise when a group separates itself from the world around it. Goldbloom's portrait of a woman on the verge of claiming her own agency even after she thought all her life's questions had been answered makes for fascinating, stirring reading.
