The Weight of Ink: A Novel

by Rachel Kadish,
The Jerusalem Post, July 21, 2017

Rachel Kadish spins a tale about a rabbi, a 17th-century female scholar and the pursuit of knowledge The Weight of Ink, the third novel by Rachel Kadish, the author of Tolstoy Lies: A Love Story and From a Sealed Room, begins with the discovery of a cache of mid-17th-century Jewish documents during the renovation of a house in Richmond, England. Assisted by Aaron Levy, a handsome graduate student from the United States, Helen Watt, a cantankerous 64-year-old professor of Jewish studies at a prestigious English university, races against another academic team to uncover the identity of “Aleph,” the scribe of the blind Rabbi Moses HaCoen Mendes. Surprised to find that the scribe was a woman, an emigrant from Amsterdam and a refugee from the Inquisition, Watt and Levy immerse themselves in her world and, along the way, learn a lot about themselves.

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