Part coming-of-age story and part family dynamics, this is the story of an unusual family. Avi is an Israeli born and bred Cantor in Berlin living with his 15-year old daughter Margarita. Her American, linguist mother, Marsha, lives in the U.S. and has little involvement with Margarita to this point. The action takes place in Germany, Israel, and Chicago, where Margarita spends time every summer with her maternal grandparents. While there, Margarita is heavily pressured to go to Israel to stay with her mother who has a summer Fellowship to study Yiddish and Arabic as “oppressed minority languages.”

This is a translation from German, and the prose feels very German to me — methodical depictions of action, thoughts, individual insights, and development — very organized. The opposite of stream-of-consciousness and relaxing for my structured brain. What wasn’t particularly relaxing was the extreme depth of the exposure to the inner turmoil of troubled characters. Margarita’s story becomes cringeworthy in the way that only a particularly astute description of a teenaged girl’s inner struggles can be. The pressures — both internal and external — of being Jewish in multiple contexts (e.g. in Israel, Germany, or America) is thoroughly explored to the point where the reader is completely immersed in the religion from multiple viewpoints, and the impact of Jewish people dwelling within these contexts — much of which is exposed as the revelations different characters have as they develop through the story. I found all this extremely eye-opening, despite the fact that these are topics I’ve read a lot about. There are some absolutely beautiful comments about faith and ritual and Jewish Philosophy. Some very interesting thoughts about how context shapes children as much as their parents do, and how this can cause friction and non-understanding between them.

In the acknowledgements, the author explains that she worked on the novel the year before the events of Oct 2023 so the huge impact that the Hamas massacre had on Israel and the rest of the world is not a part of the story, though I noticed that you can see some hints in a few of the attitudes of some characters. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book — the characters are dysfunctional — not in a hopeless or upsetting way, as they are all working to figure things out and improve themselves and their lives, but in a painful way to read. However, I am very glad I read the book and feel like I gained some fresh understanding of the lives of people very different than myself (which is big part of what I look for in my reading).