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Miri1
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 Thu, Sep 03 2020, 12:08 am
| seeker wrote: | | ... also the sister trying to start a school in Turkey? Totally different side plot, are we going to arrive at some common theme or is it just another angle of the period piece? |
Both Hanna and Becca were in a similar predicament. Hanna married a wealthy man who but gave a lot up for him, and Becca, without any prospects, chooses to support herself by going to school and probably has to pay back the agency as an educator for Jews in far away lands.
There is now a connection between the two, as Felix has discovered that the man who wanted to advertise positions in his paper, and who beat him later in the ghetto, is in the sinister business of recruiting young women, like the two unfortunate girls that Becca met on the boat to Turkey. We have heard that they are in trouble through the letter that Felix referenced, though he is still in the dark as to the meaning of the letter.
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seeker
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 12:26 am
| Miri1 wrote: | Both Hanna and Becca were in a similar predicament. Hanna married a wealthy man who but gave a lot up for him, and Becca, without any prospects, chooses to support herself by going to school and probably has to pay back the agency as an educator for Jews in far away lands.
There is now a connection between the two, as Felix has discovered that the man who wanted to advertise positions in his paper, and who beat him later in the ghetto, is in the sinister business of recruiting young women, like the two unfortunate girls that Becca met on the boat to Turkey. We have heard that they are in trouble through the letter that Felix referenced, though he is still in the dark as to the meaning of the letter. |
Oh cool. I hadn't gotten that far, I'm a little behind. Small world...?
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Miri1
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 12:36 am
| seeker wrote: | | Oh cool. I hadn't gotten that far, I'm a little behind. Small world...? |
He may be THE recruiter or he may be A recruiter who has nothing to do with the two young ladies. He may just have allowed Felix to discover this nasty netherworld that takes advantage of impoverished young women - his mother and aunt could easily have been sucked in - Hannah's marriage and Becca's job are blessings when faced with the awful experience of these girls.
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PinkFridge
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 10:09 am
| amother [ Rose ] wrote: | | I do. Don't know why but I find the thought a little nauseating. It's at the same time so predictable (in a piece of fiction) and so completely unrealistic (if any of these characters would be real). The author writes very well but the story is full of anachronisms. There are things that make me cringe to the point that I'll skip it for a week and then I find myself reading it again. Not an anachronism but how unrealistic is this?- -looks like they just found Perla, the missing sister, dressed in a nun's habit and speaking Yiddish. The author did enough research not to have anyone get on a plane or make a long distance call, but there's something so 2020 about the characters. Anyway, let me not be critical. I don't write that well, and looks like the serial has lots of fans. Let's all enjoy the wedding when it finally appears in print... or at least sit it out without spoiling it for the people who were dying to attend and dance. |
 This is reminding me of Sequoia's exquisite eviscerating of M.Kenan's Kuzari series. Despite the review, I'm still not dampened on the author, in both cases.
But what anachronisms are you finding?
About their 21st century sensitivities, this reminds me of something Rebbetzin (Heller) Gottlieb said. Our elte bubbes didn't wash their laundry down by the crek together and ask each other, Shprintza Hinde, do you feel self-actualized? But Vienna had the luxury of time to reflect. Life wasn't all about working and working hard every moment to keep body and soul together.
About the nun, at first I thought Perla but I don't get that she's a midget and it makes more sense for it to be one of the girls.
ETA: Later this page I say I regret having said the bolded. (Not bolded in the original version of this post.)
Last edited by PinkFridge on Thu, Sep 03 2020, 3:18 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PinkFridge
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 10:11 am
| seeker wrote: | | Please no. There is just no reason for that. I mean he's obviously interested in her and he's a good person and she's a woman alone in a man's world but just no please. Other than being decent people they have nothing in common. 2020 me doesn't like that. I also don't like that kind of convenient shortcut in books. |
As for Felix and Chasya, you wonder, will one move toward the other? It seems that Felix is more spiritual and might grow more Jewishly. (Which happened then. Think of R' Aharon Marcus, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, others.) Of course, we can have a 20th century anachronism and have Chasya fall for Felix and be Rina Lazarus to Felix's Peter Decker. (Leah Gebber, if you're reading this, and it's going to be one of the two, please, the former.)
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Mama Bear
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 10:59 am
I'm amazed at how this little-discussed topic, the plight of girls who had no dowry in the 1800s, is the focal point of the serial. Women in the pre-war era really had it hard. It's an interesting and sobering topic, bc for all the protestations of today's modern woman about equality, being seen, etc., we need a reality check to realize how good we have it today vs. how disdained, unappreciated, and abused they were in those days.
I also love Felix's spiritual awakening that finally happened this week -- the self-therapy session he had with Joachim.
And also how Joachim viewed his father's conversion as a mere technicality, he still considers himself very Jewish.
I must admit though that I am confused sometimes by the characterization of the people in this story; I forget which era it's taking place in, bc it has too much self awareness, which probably didn't exist in those days.
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PinkFridge
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 11:01 am
| Mama Bear wrote: | I'm amazed at how this little-discussed topic, the plight of girls who had no dowry in the 1800s, is the focal point of the serial. Women in the pre-war era really had it hard. It's an interesting and sobering topic, bc for all the protestations of today's modern woman about equality, being seen, etc., we need a reality check to realize how good we have it today vs. how disdained, unappreciated, and abused they were in those days.
I also love Felix's spiritual awakening that finally happened this week -- the self-therapy session he had with Joachim.
And also how Joachim viewed his father's conversion as a mere technicality, he still considers himself very Jewish.
I must admit though that I am confused sometimes by the characterization of the people in this story; I forget which era it's taking place in, bc it has too much self awareness, which probably didn't exist in those days. |
But they had Freud, etc.
And the ham hock...wow, it really shows you step by step how assimilation happened...
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iyar
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 12:56 pm
| PinkFridge wrote: | This is reminding me of Sequoia's exquisite eviscerating of M.Kenan's Kuzari series. Despite the review, I'm still not dampened on the author, in both cases.
But what anachronisms are you finding?
About their 21st century sensitivities, this reminds me of something Rebbetzin (Heller) Gottlieb said. Our elte bubbes didn't wash their laundry down by the crek together and ask each other, Shprintza Hinde, do you feel self-actualized? But Vienna had the luxury of time to reflect. Life wasn't all about working and working hard every moment to keep body and soul together.
About the nun, at first I thought Perla but I don't get that she's a midget and it makes more sense for it to be one of the girls. |
PinkFridge, I know you didn't actually want to upset me, but I felt upset after I read that.
I was too quick to express my opinion, but it wasn't my intention to eviscerate anything, or anybody's writing.
To answer your question about anachronisms-
There's no actual object, like the clock striking in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It's more an unrealistic mindset that pervades the narrative and the characters as if they took a time machine from the 21st century to the nineteenth.
Start with the marriage of Ernst and Hannah. There was a problem of girls who had no dowry. As much as we're shocked at the shidduch crisis today, it existed generations ago. Girls from poor families couldn't marry. Some never did. A common solution for others, since the mortality rate among young childbearing women was much higher than today (both due to childbirth complications and to the lack of antibiotics and other medications to treat tuberculosis, which was rampant, and other infectious diseases) was to marry a widower with a house full of small orphaned children. Presumably Hannah wouldn't have had much say in choosing her life's partner but there's no way parents would have married off a daughter to someone so different, culturally and religiously. And even in the event that hunger and desperation would have made them consider it, no way an educated German would have chosen a wife from such a family. Socially and culturally it's very common today to see "mixed marriages". This phenomenon mainly started in post war America. Even today in Europe and even more so in Israel it's very unusual to see marriages of this sort. There are entire threads on imamother critical of the fact people won't consider a shidduch with someone from a different branch of Judaism, I'm not talking about a marriage between observant and unobservant. German Jews looked down at the uneducated Poles.
Then send Becca off to Turkey. Think of Sarah Schenirer, who started her work in the twentieth century, and how much opposition there was to taking girls out of the home and sending them to school. School mind you, not a far away country. The idea of educating girls out of the home was novel and did not go unchallenged. The thought of sending a young frum girl from Poland to Turkey to start a school - beyond unbelievable. We're not even talking about the great divide between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry which would have made this even more impossible. Then put these words into Becca's mouth, "Education brings you a job. A job means income. Income means dignity." A young girl growing up in Poland in the 1800's wouldn't have said that, however strongly the sentiment resonates with a 21st century woman reading it.
Then there are ittle episodes like Felix being left to babysit. Cute, but that wouldn't have happened a century ago.
This post is too long. I wanted to answer your question, but I didn't want to eviscerate anything.
I would have to guess that while the author did some research, she didn't personally know and have a lot of conversations with people who grew up in pre- WWII Poland, Eastern Europe, or Germany. There was a lot to be learned from them for those privileged to know such people. Besides the obvious strength of character and Emunah that let them plant their Yiddishkeit on foreign soil, they could teach a lot about the cultural and societal mores that influenced them. Wherever we are in galus we absorb a lot from the foreign culture we find ourselves in, and having our eyes open to that is a good thing, even just to help us realize that some things we consider worthwhile values might be borrowed from foreign influences. Pretending a young girl growing up in Trump's America thinks and behaves like a young girl growing up in the world of Franz Josef, Kaiser of Austria isn't correct, but it's not a crime either.
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seeker
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 3:12 pm
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Yeah I did wonder what made Ernst want to marry Hannah in the first place. Maybe the author will give us a little backstory on that?
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PinkFridge
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 3:17 pm
| iyar wrote: | PinkFridge, I know you didn't actually want to upset me, but I felt upset after I read that.
I was too quick to express my opinion, but it wasn't my intention to eviscerate anything, or anybody's writing.
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I'm not even reading the rest of the post before replying. I'm glad you know I didn't mean to upset you. I think I've used that phrase before and won't again. I am actually totally in awe about people who read books and can so elegantly analyze, and who see things that I don't. Case in point, and since it's not here, I won't say the name of the book: a high school English teacher who said that a certain book was a good read and well worth the time, but not long on setting, which was a pity because the book was so good.
It's really bracing to read thinking like yours.
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PinkFridge
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 3:21 pm
| iyar wrote: | PinkFridge, I know you didn't actually want to upset me, but I felt upset after I read that.
I was too quick to express my opinion, but it wasn't my intention to eviscerate anything, or anybody's writing.
To answer your question about anachronisms- |
I look forward to reading the postscript to the story, that bonus week or two after the last installment, where the talks about the research she did, etc.
I think she has her work cut out for her ;-D Though she may well have based some of these stories on real lines from journals or works such as Awakenings. (By Pauline Wengeroff.) Were they exceptions rather than the rule? Possible. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.
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InnerMe
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Thu, Sep 03 2020, 6:47 pm
omg, I am absolutely in love with this story.
The mood is just.... so chilling. And the language she uses is so visceral and real.
It's interesting to read your analysis, Iyar.
I'm thinking that it's funny - I normally don't like historical fictions... I can't connect to them. But perhaps here I love it because of what you are saying - she's inserting some 20th century like thinking into these characters and situations - so it's more relatable.
Whether that's a good thing for literature or not... well maybe not?
Either way I feel like I'm tasting the words while reading her serial, they just delight my writerly soul.
I'm thinking also of the serial from Miriam Zakon - what was it called? Freefall?
I think that also had elements of what you mention, although it did take place in a more recent era. But that was also another historical fiction that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I'm thinking it might have to do with that aspect too.
Another thing - Iyar - it sounds like you possibly had ancestors/ relatives that grew up in that region - and you feel it's an injustice the way she's portraying the situation and circumstances inaccurately?
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Mama Bear
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Sun, Sep 06 2020, 12:27 pm
Wow, Inner Me, that's exactly what I was thinking. This is a serial where every word is to be savored. It's such high quality literature, this is what the jewish world needs. High quality. No contrived plots, no predictable deux-es-machina, sentence structure and syntax that jumps off the page, that you want to reread just to inhale it.
Leah Gebber is a wordsmith.
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Mama Bear
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Sun, Sep 06 2020, 12:33 pm
| iyar wrote: | PinkFridge, I know you didn't actually want to upset me, but I felt upset after I read that.
I was too quick to express my opinion, but it wasn't my intention to eviscerate anything, or anybody's writing.
To answer your question about anachronisms-
There's no actual object, like the clock striking in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It's more an unrealistic mindset that pervades the narrative and the characters as if they took a time machine from the 21st century to the nineteenth.
Start with the marriage of Ernst and Hannah. There was a problem of girls who had no dowry. As much as we're shocked at the shidduch crisis today, it existed generations ago. Girls from poor families couldn't marry. Some never did. A common solution for others, since the mortality rate among young childbearing women was much higher than today (both due to childbirth complications and to the lack of antibiotics and other medications to treat tuberculosis, which was rampant, and other infectious diseases) was to marry a widower with a house full of small orphaned children. Presumably Hannah wouldn't have had much say in choosing her life's partner but there's no way parents would have married off a daughter to someone so different, culturally and religiously. And even in the event that hunger and desperation would have made them consider it, no way an educated German would have chosen a wife from such a family. Socially and culturally it's very common today to see "mixed marriages". This phenomenon mainly started in post war America. Even today in Europe and even more so in Israel it's very unusual to see marriages of this sort. There are entire threads on imamother critical of the fact people won't consider a shidduch with someone from a different branch of Judaism, I'm not talking about a marriage between observant and unobservant. German Jews looked down at the uneducated Poles.
Then send Becca off to Turkey. Think of Sarah Schenirer, who started her work in the twentieth century, and how much opposition there was to taking girls out of the home and sending them to school. School mind you, not a far away country. The idea of educating girls out of the home was novel and did not go unchallenged. The thought of sending a young frum girl from Poland to Turkey to start a school - beyond unbelievable. We're not even talking about the great divide between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry which would have made this even more impossible. Then put these words into Becca's mouth, "Education brings you a job. A job means income. Income means dignity." A young girl growing up in Poland in the 1800's wouldn't have said that, however strongly the sentiment resonates with a 21st century woman reading it.
Then there are ittle episodes like Felix being left to babysit. Cute, but that wouldn't have happened a century ago.
This post is too long. I wanted to answer your question, but I didn't want to eviscerate anything.
I would have to guess that while the author did some research, she didn't personally know and have a lot of conversations with people who grew up in pre- WWII Poland, Eastern Europe, or Germany. There was a lot to be learned from them for those privileged to know such people. Besides the obvious strength of character and Emunah that let them plant their Yiddishkeit on foreign soil, they could teach a lot about the cultural and societal mores that influenced them. Wherever we are in galus we absorb a lot from the foreign culture we find ourselves in, and having our eyes open to that is a good thing, even just to help us realize that some things we consider worthwhile values might be borrowed from foreign influences. Pretending a young girl growing up in Trump's America thinks and behaves like a young girl growing up in the world of Franz Josef, Kaiser of Austria isn't correct, but it's not a crime either. |
I noticed all of that too, which is why I was so confused in which era the story is taking place. It sounds both very primitive and very modern at the same time.
Leah Gebber - whose real identity I know - replied to my email to her, that this is in the 1880s.
It's close enough to the turn of the century for some of the storyline to make sense. But not all of it.
By the way, I think that allowing Becca to go to Paris to university means that Hannah/Becca's parents were slightly more progressive than others in the shtetl?
We also still don't know which country they grew up in. Ernst/Hannah currently live in Prague? Ernst is from Vienna, but they now live in prague, right? So where did Hannah and Becca grow up? Are you sure it's Poland?
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PinkFridge
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Sun, Sep 06 2020, 1:04 pm
| Mama Bear wrote: | I noticed all of that too, which is why I was so confused in which era the story is taking place. It sounds both very primitive and very modern at the same time.
Leah Gebber - whose real identity I know - replied to my email to her, that this is in the 1880s.
It's close enough to the turn of the century for some of the storyline to make sense. But not all of it.
By the way, I think that allowing Becca to go to Paris to university means that Hannah/Becca's parents were slightly more progressive than others in the shtetl?
We also still don't know which country they grew up in. Ernst/Hannah currently live in Prague? Ernst is from Vienna, but they now live in prague, right? So where did Hannah and Becca grow up? Are you sure it's Poland? |
The parents seem weary. Maybe they had already seen so much attrition in their shtetl that they felt powerless.
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GLUE
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Thu, Oct 01 2020, 11:31 pm
Dear iyar,
I do not know what went on in Europe in the 1800's, but in America it was common at that time for people who were frum and not to marry if they wanted to marry Jewish. I read a lout of the history on parenting in that era in America & yes people would leave their kids with boys to babysit if they even got a babysitter. It was very common for people just to leave their little kids alone.(people would just tie toddles to a fence, many toddles were clothes that had strings sewn on them). This was the era in which girls would work in factory's so they can pay for their brothers to go to collage, some girls (not as common) would use the money to go to school.
Is the author American? That would explain a lot.
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InnerMe
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Wed, Dec 16 2020, 6:40 pm
| seeker wrote: | | Yeah I did wonder what made Ernst want to marry Hannah in the first place. Maybe the author will give us a little backstory on that? |
Did you guys notice in last week's episode the author mentions how Ernst was fleeing from student riots at Prague University and landed up at Hanna's doorstep in the shtetl... which apparently led to marriage.
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amother
Blonde
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Wed, Dec 16 2020, 6:46 pm
| InnerMe wrote: | | Did you guys notice in last week's episode the author mentions how Ernst was fleeing from student riots at Prague University and landed up at Hanna's doorstep in the shtetl... which apparently led to marriage. |
I like that. Because otherwise, how would it have happened? Hannah wasn't looking outside her world.
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amother
Puce
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Wed, Dec 16 2020, 8:39 pm
Leah gebber is such an incredible, nuanced writer.
This story has so many layers. I read some of the serials and I literally cringe. They’re actually an insult to our intelligence.
She in the other hand is the real deal.
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PinkFridge
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Thu, Dec 17 2020, 9:12 am
| InnerMe wrote: | | Did you guys notice in last week's episode the author mentions how Ernst was fleeing from student riots at Prague University and landed up at Hanna's doorstep in the shtetl... which apparently led to marriage. |
Yes, I noticed that, and am confused. How far is Hanna's shtetl from Prague U?
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