The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish

I read Kadish’s work in a year that began with a pandemic and ended with wildfires that shrouded our region in smoke for two weeks. It seemed appropriate that The Weight of Ink reaches its climax in a plague and has its denouement in the Great London fire of 1666. Of course, I didn’t know about the fires forthcoming in either book or reality when I started. I read the book because it was everything I love in a novel—meticulously researched historical fiction, nuanced in its perspectives and masterful in its wordcraft.

And it included a plague—a plague long, long ago and far, far away. What could more timely? Kadish’s epic transported me to Israel, Amsterdam, and London. I traveled through time to the seventeenth century, witnessed the trials and triumphs of unacknowledged genius. It was a journey well worth the $18.99 fare.

But upon completion, I hesitated to write a review. I could not, I feared, do the book justice. For one, I am not a Jew. My ancestors have not endured millennia of persecution, prejudice, oppression, and outright genocide. That the Weight of Ink was a National Jewish Book Awards Winner substantiates its representation of experiences very other than mine.

But I also found myself ill at ease with the historical protagonist’s conclusions. In essence, the position to which the Jewish Ester comes is based on evolutionary philosophy: Life wants to live. Everything in nature strives for survival. By extension, and through a tortuous series of trials including sexism, abandonment, poverty, plague, and more, she concludes that humans, too, are justified in doing what is necessary to survive.

Ester takes this one step further and asserts that not only are we justified in strenuously defending our own physical lives, but in pursuing the style of life we were created to live. In her case, it is the right to devote herself to the life of the mind—a right denied her by her cultural milieu.

It is hard to argue with such a conclusion, especially given the trauma we witness in the pages of Ink. But I wrestled with it for some time. These two points—the right to survive and the right to pursue a meaningful existence—merit separate responses.

To address the latter first, we were inarguably created, male and female, to enjoy a life rich in the physical, spiritual, and intellectual realms. That will look different for each of us, depending on our giftings and interests. But the most essential element of the life we were created for is communion with God. To overlook that is to render meaningless the rest.

It is the first point—that “life wants to live” that is hardest to contest. As image-bearers of the Creator, we defend life—especially, but not exclusively, the powerless, the victims, the oppressed. How can we fault Ester and her contemporaries for defending their own lives? Would we not do the same?

But the question kept recurring to me: Is Ester’s position at odds with Jesus’s statement that “he who wants to save his life must lose it”?

Jesus was a Jew. He lived under an oppressive foreign government. He died an unjust death. Granted, his purpose in coming to earth was to give up his life; one could argue that that sets him apart from the rest of us mortals. On the other hand, the gospels and the epistles abound with exhortations to follow Christ’s example in laying down our lives.

Christians can do that because of our hope—and the Bible’s repeated assurance—that mortal life is not the end. By contrast, Ester writes, in her final days, “I believe in no heaven or hell, nor any world to come, yet I know not whether life be snuffed wholly by death or merely assume some unknown form. … I do not believe my soul as I know it will be allowed a single footfall beyond the threshold of death” p. (530).

Ester’s triumph over obstacles to live the life she longs for in The Weight of Ink seems ample justification for self-preservation, humanity’s most basic instinct. We breathe a sigh of relief to see her comfortably situated at the end of her story.

But isn’t that the tension Jesus followers live with? We celebrate happy endings and rejoice in God’s blessings of abundance, felicity, and successful endeavor. But when it comes to daily choices, to what extent do we follow our dreams—our giftings, our loves, our desires, our hopes—and when are we called to give them up? As a writer I constantly question the intent of my literary endeavors: To whom or what am I hoping to draw attention?

In quibbling with Ester’s conclusions, I’m not suggesting that anyone should acquiesce to injustice or that we should cease to defend the lives and livelihoods of the persecuted. There is no excuse—in history or the present—for those who oppress or tolerate oppression. But resistance can take diverse forms. What is self-serving in one may be sacrificial in another. The subtle undermining of norms may look like acquiescence.

I have little argument with Ester’s actions, or those of Helen, the protagonist of Kadish’s contemporary story line. The story opens in 2000 with the discovery of a sheaf of anonymous letters dating to the seventeenth century. The collection falls into the hands of a professor nearing forced retirement due to failing health.

In the course of the book, Helen moves from academic territorialism to a more generous professionalism. She lowers her defenses and accepts help from friends and colleagues. She forgives—albeit belatedly—a lover whose devotion to ideals wedged them apart in their youth. For that matter, Ester, too, forgives, and even cares for on his deathbed, the man whose intervention prevented her marriage to the man she truly loved.

In a 2018 Paris Review article, Kadish wrote that historical fiction is important because it introduces us to characters who represent unsung lives; individuals whose names have fallen by the wayside despite their contributions to society, culture, or the lives of others. She said she took pains that the experiences of her seventeenth-century protagonist should be plausible, as supported by Kadish’s research. Women who employed their God-given intellect against the tide of their society should be celebrated; all of us should question whether we are availing ourselves of the freedom to use ours.

I don’t need to embrace Ester’s principles. Reading Kadish’s novel can help me understand how and why Ester arrived at them. Indeed, reading works that take us beyond our own experiences is a responsibility and a privilege, especially when they are executed with such mastery as this one.

There is much to enjoy as well as endorse in Kadish’s book. Lovers and scholars confessing their failures. An ambitious professor with a callused soul learning grace and generosity. Two brilliant female minds meeting across time and distance. The interweaving of individuals and histories to affirm our common humanity. Helen observes: “It was indeed all of our history. No people’s thread was separate from any other’s, but everyone’s fate was woven together in this illuminated, love-stricken world” (531).

Kadish’s novel bears witness to this truth.