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The TBS Book Club will read Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink. This is Kadish’s third novel, and it was just named one of the winners of the National Jewish Book Award.

The date we’ll be discussing it is Sunday, April 15, at 7 pm, at Mitch Fromm’s house.

About the book:
Set in London of the 1660s and in the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of an American graduate student, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.” Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work of historical fiction about women separated by centuries, and the choices and sacrifices women must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.

Rebecca Egolf