Plot: Isabella Lira is in a pickle. Her father has just died, and beyond being emotionally crippling also throws the family’s enormous business into disarray. Her father’s partners want to cut her out, and only a man in her corner will save the Lira name. Fortunately, this is easily solvable – she is young, beautiful, perfectly cultured, rich, and goddamn brilliant. So, she goes husband hunting. Her criteria is simple: he must be charming, professionally capable, and always, always take her side. That means the Sephardic Jews are out, since they’d all be in the pocket of her opponents. Thus follows the plan – cross the street, and find herself an Ashkenazi husband. By chance, she encounters a charity case of the community on her first day, and he’ll spy on her prospective spouses for a chance at independence. So what if he’s good looking, and makes her laugh, and challenges her in ways the slick businessmen she meets never seem to? Shenanigans ensue.
I’m getting a sense of Grossman as a writer now. She writes intelligent, beautiful, assertive women whose Achilles heel is emotional maturity. It’s refreshing to see women written as immature. They aren’t juvenile, to be clear, just not a fully mature person, the way most people remain all the way to their deathbed, however old they get there. Grossman’s women are just so damn determined to get what they want that they do the unthinkable – listen with an open mind to uncomfortable feedback. It takes them a hot minute to assimilate it, but doesn’t it for everyone?
I will say, it never occurred to me how used I was to reading historical fiction about Christians, because unless you’re reading about a vicar, religion pretty much never comes up. As your typical atheist Jew, the amount of time in the book dedicated to the practice of the faith, and the myriad ways in which it threads itself into your life whether you want to or not, set off feelings ranging from discomfort to boredom. Still, Grossman does an excellent job of showcasing not only the lives of these two people we are following, but the culture they grow up in, and crucially, reminds (or teaches) the reader, why the culture is the way it is. Because when you are part of a community that is regularly hunted, the thing that binds you together out of necessity also necessarily becomes a huge part of how you connect, for good or ill.