In this remarkable and assured debut, Tova Mirvis tells the story of the close-knit, carefully structured world of the Orthodox community in Memphis, Tennessee, a world that unravels when Batsheva, newly widowed and a convert to Judaism, and her five-year-old daughter, Ayala, move in.
Batsheva is free-spirited and artistic, and at first the women of the ladies auxiliary discover in her a passion for the traditions and rituals of Judaism which have become stale and routine to them. But when Batsheva becomes close with the restless high-school girls she teaches who are eager to catch glimpses of the non-Kosher world outside, and befriends, maybe a little too intimately, the beloved Rabbi's only son, Yosef, feathers begin to ruffle. When events come to a head, and Batshevea's past is revealed, the women's allegiances begin to split over whether Batsheva should be forced out of the community."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
My friend's comment inspired me to think about the way an outsider can challenge a world like the one I had grown up in. In this community everyone knows everyone else, and most people are related in some way. People feel rooted in the city; it is a community that goes back several generations. I am a fifth generation Memphian on one side, and most of my family still lives there. My great grandfather started the Jewish newspaper; my grandparents helped found the Jewish day school there. I grew up feeling thatI had a place, that I was connected to a community and a tradition.
But I also felt that there was little room to be different. There was a strong pressure to conform to a narrow definition of how you were supposed to be, and it was considered wrong to question anything about the community. For me, this was often suffocating, and ultimately I chose to live in a place that was more open.
Writing this novel was a way to explore my own relationship to this community. Adopting the point of view of the women of the Ladies Auxiliary, I began to understand their impulse to preserve a way of life that sometimes felt as if it was slipping away. I missed the sense of kinship that I grew up with. I missed being rooted in a place and having deep connections to a city and the people who live there. But I also felt the difficulty of trying to live in such a close-knit world. I discovered that writing about the community where I grew up separated me more from it. It was as if I had broken a pact not to reveal the inner workings of this world and could never be inside of it again. But for me, part of being a writer means looking honestly at my own world and asking questions about it.
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