On Division

June 15, 2019
A Chasidic woman is surprised to find herself pregnant. Surie Eckstein is a 57-year-old Chasidic woman with 10 children. Most of her children are married with children of their own. When Surie discovers that she's pregnant--with twins, no less!--she's shocked, of course, but also ashamed, anticipating the responses of her friends and neighbors. They'll know she's still having relations with her beloved husband, Yidel. "The women of the community would say mazal tov, but privately, they'd blush for her, the sex-crazed hussy." So Surie doesn't tell anyone. Goldbloom (You Lose These, 2011, etc.), who is herself Chasidic, writes with great depth of feeling about this close community but also with humor. Surie grows larger and larger, vaguely hoping that Yidel will figure out her secret without needing to be told. Instead, the secret of her pregnancy becomes twisted up with another painful secret: Surie and Yidel, it emerges, had a son named Lipa who died four years earlier and--to their shame--was gay. Unable to discuss Lipa with Yidel, Surie finds herself unable to discuss the pregnancy, either. In the meantime, time passes. Surie starts helping out at the clinic where she's receiving prenatal care and, to her surprise, starts to feel a kind of fulfillment there. Goldbloom's characterization of Surie, and of the whole cast, is wonderfully complex. She shows the joy of belonging to a community as well as the feelings of frustration at its strictures. How can a community bind itself together? How can one person ever truly know another? Goldbloom explores complicated questions about community and individuality with humor, wit, and great sensitivity.

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July 1, 2019
A secret sparks a path toward self-discovery in Goldbloom’s revelatory latest (after The Paperbark Shoe), set amid the Hasidic community in contemporary Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. At 57, Surie Eckstein is the mother of 10 children, a grandmother to 32, and is about to become a great-grandmother for the first time. Then she discovers that she is pregnant—with twins. Surie is ashamed to reveal her pregnancy, lest she be judged for maintaining a sexual relationship with her husband long past customary childbearing age; she feels she can’t even reveal her secret to her husband, Yidel, a prominent scribe. Surie fears that Yidel’s desire to maintain the family’s reputation—previously harmed by their son Lipa’s estrangement from their family and community—might cause him to shun the babies, or Surie herself. Instead of turning toward her community for support, then, Surie looks outside it, beginning to imagine a different future for herself and for some of the younger women in her life: “Instead of her usual terror, there was this new thing, a cautious curiosity about the world.” Goldbloom writes about Surie’s community fondly but also critically, examining both the kindness and the intolerance that can arise when a group separates itself from the world around it. Goldbloom’s portrait of a woman on the verge of claiming her own agency even after she thought all her life’s questions had been answered makes for fascinating, stirring reading.

September 1, 2019
Surie Eckstein is a pillar in her Chasidic neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She and her husband, Yidel, are the parents of 10 and the grandparents of 32. A breast-cancer survivor, Surie basks in the warmth of her teeming household, but she is haunted by the death of a son, whose tragic tale slowly emerges, and burdened with a mortifying secret: at 57 she is pregnant, with twins. As the months go by, marked by exuberant celebrations of Jewish holidays, Yidel remains strangely oblivious, and Surie envisions new possibilities as her midwife trains her to assist at the clinic. But Orthodox women are not allowed to be so worldly, and Surie fears the consequences for her family. Goldbloom's intimate descriptions of domestic hubbub, emotional tumult, and nature's vibrancy deepen this authentic and suspenseful portrait of a strong, conflicted woman. Award-winning novelist and LGBTQ activist Goldbloom, who is Chasidic and a mother of eight, vitally portrays the complex dynamics and paradoxes of a strictly regimented, unforgiving, yet loving religious enclave, and imaginatively and boldly explores the divide between tradition and compassion, community and self.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)