Historical Novel

The year is 2025. A quarter of a century into the millennium. It seems things have reached a boiling point. A war that began two years ago has engulfed our world. All other wars have been forgotten. Only the Holocaust remains. Some say it is happening now. Socially... we have known better days. But haven’t there always been differences of opinion, to put it mildly? In schools, creative artificial intelligence has reshuffled the deck after years in which educational standards became increasingly bureaucratic. What a pity we didn’t make the most of fostering creative thinking in children, thinks Sadie, the book’s protagonist. But yes, creative thinking has been nurtured for two thousand years in Jewish communities around the world: in study circles, in utopian visions, in travel journals, and in the interconnectedness of letters of questions and answers that traveled back and forth across continents.

This book explores the middle ground between the Sabbath-loving pioneers and the poems of Bialik, who built Israel with their own hands, and the 2000s, when it seems the land is becoming drenched in the colors of chaos. Readers will connect with this book, explore the background of what is happening today in Israel and in education worldwide, and discover the possibilities inherent in hope.

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At the start of her second year of literature studies at the Mount Scopus campus in 1989, Sadie is studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Once a week, Sadie goes to the far end of the campus to dance folk dances, a place that resembles the forest from the Shakespearean play, a chaotic space. A girl dances with a boy, who immediately asks another girl to dance, though she has already promised the next dance to another boy, whose eyes are actually fixed on the girl at the far end of the room who stands out against her will. Every now and then, Sadie and her dorm mates are invited to Shabbat dinner at the home of her English literature professor, a single Holocaust survivor whom all four of them would marry in a heartbeat. So creative.

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Sadie wants to be a creative writer like the greats, but she’ll discover that it’s not easy being the parent of creative kids in school. Even in elementary school, where they still remember the verb “to play.” Meanwhile, the winds of war are picking up, talk of Scuds, the distribution of gas masks. How on earth can you even wear them? Until anxiety explodes into the reality of campus life. At a summit meeting on the New Year’s Eve of 2000, the four friends and the professor discover that their lives have taken different paths, but also that the year they shared on the cusp of the 1990s was significant for their lives—for the relationships they found, if they found them, and for the children they bore or dreamed of.
 

The four dorm mates embody the diversity of the cultures from which they came: secular Ashkenazi, ultra-Orthodox, Ethiopian, and traditional Mizrahi. Their evening conversations around the table in their simple dorm apartment span the globe, just as their fields of study are diverse: archaeology, the Middle East, literature, and international relations. Only the beloved but elusive professor can bring order to the chaos of their conversations with plenty of Jewish humor—which he sees as an important component of Jewish creative thinking—and with care and compassion—the ethical foundation of a creative, productive society. It turns out this is the key. And the young women intend to take it with them as they are abruptly thrust into life against their will, with the outbreak of the Gulf War.

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The core stories of the four friends, who live together during a fateful year, are inspired by the stories of the four matriarchs of the Torah, reimagined in a modern setting. And so, how could they not become leaders?! The characters of the four friends are also based on the sisters from the book Little Women, beloved across generations. This historical novel is woven with great creativity from the author’s imagination, based on personal experiences that will be familiar to many. A breathtaking novel, written to lead toward a better future, which begins with accepting ourselves as we are now. A book so entertaining it’s almost painful, one you won’t be able to put down, whose main message is that hope is something you build, just like Grandpa Israel, who built houses with his gentle hands.