The Weight of Ink

This section significantly develops the characters of Helen and Ester by revealing important information about their backstories. In Ester’s case, this backstory goes back generations, including the stories of her mother and grandmother. By including the stories of generations of women who came before her, Kadish highlights the importance of familial and personal history within a novel focused on history and how stories are transmitted across time.

Ester’s perspective on the world, and particularly on romantic relationships, has been significantly shaped by what she learned from her unhappy mother. As a result, Ester believes that “it’s a danger to a woman even to feel love” (186). This quotation shows that while Ester is bold and courageous in Choosing Risk Over Caution in an intellectual sense, she is very fearful when it comes to emotions and desire. Ironically, while Ester longs to defy social and religious conventions that constrain her freedom, she imposes constraints on aspects of herself: “[A]ll within her that was unruly, raging, sensuous—all that terrified and drew her—could be quashed” (131).

Ester’s distrust of sexuality and love reveals that, despite doing many things that were not typically available to women of the time, she was not truly free to live an authentic life. Mary functions as an important foil character to Ester; while she is often vapid and selfish, she possesses an emotional freedom that often inspires envy in Ester. Characters like Mary and Rivka contrast with Ester to show that women were constantly navigating constrained and limiting social roles, choosing different compromises based on their personalities and values. While Ester is the protagonist and it is easy to see her as a heroine, she is at times quite limited, self-absorbed, and self-righteous. In her desire to achieve accomplishments that are traditionally associated with masculine success, Ester risks becoming disdainful of women like Rivka, who choose humility and self-sacrifice, or women like Mary, who choose to celebrate femininity, emotions, and sensuality. Ester’s private dilemma is that she does not know how to reconcile her Love of Learning and Scholarship with other forms of love and ways of being—a dilemma that Helen has also faced in her own life.

Ester’s family history shows that the rebellious and free-thinking aspects of her personality did not come out of nowhere. Her grandmother, Lizabeta, defied social conventions by pursuing an adulterous affair with a man who was not Jewish, while her mother, Constantina, rebelled against Jewish social customs and beliefs. Constantina’s frustration with orthodoxy and religious tradition led her to lash out with angry statements like “you trap me in a box full of Jews” (127), revealing that Ester’s mother was a stubborn and defiant woman who wanted to think for herself and make her own decisions. Ester absorbed the idea that women were often unhappy and trapped no matter what choices they tried to make, and this makes her inclined to be secretive and furtive. Ester’s decision to hide her marriage prospect by burning the letter from the matchmaker rather than showing it to the Rabbi is one of her first acts of betrayal and deceit, and it foreshadows how she will later deceive him extensively in order to be able to write her own ideas. The act of burning the letter also reinforces the motif of fire in the novel (See: Symbols & Motifs), which is present at various pivotal moments in Ester’s life, such as when her parents die or when she marries Alvaro.

While Ester’s family history contextualizes how she grew into the woman she is, Helen’s personal history also significantly develops her character. As a young woman, like Ester herself, Helen rebelled against convention and social expectations by going to Israel. Her father’s rebuke—“this adventure of yours has lasted long enough and it’s time you ended it. There’s a path in life, and one cannot step off it” (151)—shows that, even between the 1650s and the 1950s, ideas of social norms had not fully changed, especially for young women. Helen’s rebellious and free-thinking nature is not readily apparent given her often cool and aloof exterior; her personal history is kept hidden, much like how Ester’s documents lay hidden for hundreds of years.

The relationship between Helen and Dror shows that, like Ester, she made a choice to reject romantic love, and also develops the theme of Barriers Between Individuals From Different Cultures and Beliefs. At first, Helen is brave and defiant, but she gradually becomes fearful about whether it will be possible to have a happy life with a man who is very different from her. Like Ester, Helen fears that love is only going to make her unhappy and inhibit her freedom. However, because Helen lives in a different historical era, she is able to build an intellectual and professional life after she rejects the possibility of a romantic life. Nonetheless, Helen’s obsession with the documents hints that she may regret her choice: she thinks to herself, “in exchange for such a find she’d tendered her life” (143), implying that she gave away a more authentic version of who she truly is.

The subplot of Helen’s relationship with Dror brings an increasingly strong focus on Jewish history and identity into the narrative. Dror is insistent that in order to understand him, Helen needs to understand the entirety of the Jewish people and their long history of suffering. Dror sees himself not just as an individual, but as someone who is enmeshed in the long and often tragic history of a whole people. This tension between individualism and collective identity also animates struggles for Aaron, Constantina, and Spinoza, showing that the question of how to be one’s authentic self while maintaining an identity as a Jew has been a challenge at many different times in history. As Helen summarizes, it seems that people have repeatedly faced “a stark choice[:] Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both” (218).

Since Helen and Dror’s relationship unfolded 46 years earlier than the primary plot, it functions as a secondary historical narrative and highlights an important moment in Jewish history. The modern state of Israel was established in 1948, and Helen and Dror explore their relationship in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. From this vantage point, it is understandable that Dror sees Jewish history as primarily tragic.

Within this context of documenting the many atrocities faced by the Jewish people, this section repeatedly explores the idea of compromising in order to survive. Helen is fascinated by the history of Masada, and it even seems influential to her later decision to become a historian, as she reflects on the idea of how records of events survive and are passed down. The siege of Masada took place in 73-74 CE during the First Jewish-Roman War, in which the Jewish defenders of the fort of Masada are said to have died by suicide instead of surrendering alive. However, Helen challenges the vilifying of individuals who chose not to participate in the mass suicide event, demanding, “Why was it cowardly to want to live?” (158). Helen correctly points out that compromising in order to survive in unendurable circumstances is what allows legacies to exist. The oral testimony of the two survivors became the backbone of the written account, mirroring how Ester’s documents became her legacy.

The traditional account of events at Masada, in which two women lived on to tell their stories, directly mirrors important themes and events in the novel. In subsequent events, Ester and Rivka will likewise choose life over all else and make terrible compromises, including renouncing their Jewish faith. Likewise, during the Spanish Inquisition (during which many Jews were tortured, killed, and forced to convert to Christianity), Rabbi Mendes admits, “I begged for life. After my father and mother had asserted their faith” (197). He has always been ashamed of this event, which he sees as evidence that he lacked true moral courage. These various storylines set the stage for Ester’s subsequent philosophical exploration of desire (including, primarily, the desire to live) as the major animating force of the universe, challenging narratives about the nobility of self-sacrifice.

Against this complex backdrop of a legacy of suffering in Jewish history, simmering tensions between Helen and Aaron come to a head when they get into an argument about the legitimacy of Helen working on a Jewish story. While they later become a loyal team, Helen and Aaron have a somewhat antagonistic relationship for much of the early part of the novel. Aaron resents Helen’s resistance to comradery, and her complete focus at a time when he feels so unmoored. Not coincidentally, Aaron lashes out at Helen immediately after an email in which Marisa rejects him—he feels disempowered in a situation where women seem to be making all of the decisions.

While he may be operating partially from a space of masculine entitlement, Aaron asks important questions when he challenges Helen’s assumption that it is no different for her to study Jewish history than a Jewish person. He alludes to a significant British colonial and imperialist history when he accuses her of being “Brits who get their kicks out of dissecting other people’s histories” (213). The use of the word “dissecting” reveals how Aaron feels that Helen and other non-Jewish individuals take a cold and clinical approach to history, without truly understanding the emotional weight that it can carry for those affected by it.