If a life examined is worth living, as Plato reminded us, then surely it is worthwhile to examine the lives of the following three contemporary women and four fictional — or fictionalized — female characters.
Arlene Blum’s memoir, Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life (Harcourt, paper, $14) — first published in hardcover two years ago — is a captivating, multi-layered story. Blum nurtured a career in science at a time when women were routinely turned away from doctoral programs. She concurrently pursued an avocation of mountain climbing, another arena in which she was told women were incapable. Yet Blum persisted, struggling in science as she struggled across glaciers and up ice walls around the world.
Blum begins each chapter with stories of her quirky family: her mentally unstable, musically brilliant mother, a perpetually crabby grandmother, and a kindly grandfather. It should be a recipe for disaster, but as her childhood story evolves next to her adult story, the reader begins to see how they are connected.
Art historian Eunice Lipton also pairs childhood recollections with adult decisions in French Seduction (Carroll & Graf, cloth, $23.95). Her father is difficult — she once refused to speak with him for a decade — but she loves him. She also loves France, where she now lives full-time, an equally complicated relationship. She examines these relationships side by side as she picks apart the parent-child relationship, the French people’s often-hostile relationship with Jews (including contemporary anti-Semitism), their role in the Holocaust, along with loving descriptions of the role that art has played in her life.
Photojournalist Ruth Gruber traveled in the Arctic and Siberia, interviewed Virginia Woolf, assisted the Oswego refugees (one of the first groups of Holocaust refugees allowed in the U.S.) and worked for Eleanor Roosevelt. And these highlights are just from the first half of Witness (Schocken, cloth, $27.50), a memoir of words and photos. Gruber, now 95, documented, and was directly involved in, some of the most important events of the 20th century.
She became friends with Ben Gurion during the formation of Israel, and bore witness to the Nuremberg Trials, the post-war arrival in Palestine of the refugee ship Exodus, and the Israeli airlifts of Iraqi and Yemeni Jews.
In fiction, four historical novels profile women of dramatically different time periods.
Eva Etzioni-Halevy, professor emeritus of sociology at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and author of the popular The Song of Hannah, has turned to Biblical-based fiction in retirement. Her new book, The Garden of Ruth (Plume, paper, $14), builds two stories from the bare bones of the books of Ruth and I Samuel. A young teenage girl, Osnath, comes to stay with relatives at their family compound in Bethlehem. This is Jesse’s family, father of the soon-to-be anointed King David. Osnath discovers fragments of scrolls that appear to be written by Ruth (Jesse’s mother) and becomes determined to reconstruct her story, despite the objections of Eliab, Jesse’s oldest son — who provides some of the story’s necessary romantic spice and intrigue.
In the second half of the novel we read Osnath’s reconstruction — Ruth’s story in her own words. For those who are always looking for the backstory, these types of books fascinate with their imaginative reading between the lines. Etzioni-Halevy’s writing is occasionally a bit stilted, perhaps the result of trying to sound more ancient, but the story beguiles.
Maggie Anton has published the second in her Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, Book II: Miriam (Plume, paper, $15), “a novel of love and the Talmud in Medieval France.” Not much is known about the commentator, Rabbi Salomon ben Isaac (Rashi), whose words we still study, but he had no sons and it is suspected that he taught his daughters Torah.
Anton astutely captures the atmosphere of a prosperous 11th-century France, while telling the personal side of Rashi’s middle daughter who is learning to be a midwife and, still recovering from the loss of her first love, struggling in a marriage of convenience.
Several hundred years later we cross the Atlantic with 10-year-old orphan Molly Abraham. A London pickpocket, she is sent to colonial New York as an indentured servant as punishment for her crimes. A Pickpocket’s Tale (Random House, cloth, $15.95) by Karen Schwabach is intended for children (ages 8 and up) but is worthwhile for adults because it deals with Jewish life in colonial times, a subject not often treated in fiction.
Molly is taken in by a kind Jewish family who keep her clean and begin her education, but Molly distrusts their orderly life and plots her escape back to the “canting lay” (criminal underworld).
Finally, in the mid-20th century we encounter The Polish Woman (Bridge Works, cloth, $21.95), Eva Mekler’s second novel. It’s 1967 and a young Polish artist, Karolina Staszek, has received a rare visa to study in the United States. The newspaper obituary of Holocaust survivor Jake Landau stirs old and mysterious memories when she recognizes his photo. Contact with his family brings out first suspicion, and then hope that she may be a lost relative. With Jake’s nephew, Karolina returns to Poland to ferret out the truth.