Rachel Kadish Wins Association Of Jewish Libraries’ Inaugural Fiction Award
Rachel Kadish Image by Kevin Day
On Tuesday, the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) announced Rachel Kadish as the winner of its first-ever Jewish Fiction Award. Her novel, “The Weight of Ink,” was chosen from a list of 50 works of fiction with “significant Jewish thematic content,” according to an AJL blog post. Ruth Gilligan’s “Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan” and Rachel Seiffert’s “A Boy In Winter” were named “honor books” by the Awards Committee.
“The Weight of Ink,” which Julia M. Klein reviewed for the Forward, tells two parallel tales: That of Ester Velazquez, a Portuguese Jewish refugee who becomes the scribe of blind rabbi, and, centuries later, that of the British Helen Watt, a Jewish Studies professor who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and pines for one last academic discovery.
The protagonists’ stories intersect when Watt, acting on a tip, finds a trove of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s papers; as she discovers, the Rabbi was blinded during the Spanish Inquisition. She sets out to determine the documents’ scribe, who uses the pen name “Aleph.”
In her review, Klein complimented the novel’s “propulsive plot” and “distinctive characters.” The book’s primary audience, she felt, was likely academically-inclined: She continued, “anyone interested in the life of Baruch Spinoza … the fate of Jews during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, or the vagaries of archival research will find this novel rewarding.”
Similarly, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, chairperson of the AJL Awards Committee, observed that the book’s sweeping exploration of history and esoterica “honors learning, libraries, archivists and librarians.”
For her work, the AJL’s press release stated, Kadish received a $1,000 cash prize and an invitation to the organization’s annual conference.
Sam Bromer is the Forward’s culture intern. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @sam_bromer
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
