** Winner of the 2020 Jewish Fiction Award ** “A novel of wisdom and uncertainty, of love in its greater and lesser forms, and of the struggle between how it should be and how it is. It is impossible not to be moved.” –Amy Bloom, author of White Houses “This book brings the reader into the heart of a close-knit Jewish family and their joys, loves, and sorrows . . . A marvelous book by a … and sorrows . . . A marvelous book by a masterful writer.”
–Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife
“As beautiful as it is unexpected.”
–Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
Through one woman’s life at a moment of surprising change, the award-winning author Goldie Goldbloom tells a deeply affecting, morally insightful story and offers a rare look inside Brooklyn’s Chasidic community
On Division Avenue, just a block or two up from the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second. She and Yidel, a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year, live on the third. Wed when Surie was sixteen, they have a happy marriage and a full life, and, at the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two, they are looking forward to some quiet time together.
Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It is a shock. And at her age, at this stage, it is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. She feels exposed, ashamed. She is unable to share the news, even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life, she has a secret–a secret that slowly separates her from the community.
Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It is a shock. And at her age, at this stage, it is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. She feels exposed, ashamed. She is unable to share the news, even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life, she has a secret–a secret that slowly separates her from the community.
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On Division is brilliant and beautiful. This book brings the reader into the heart of a close-knit Jewish family and their joys, loves, and sorrows. Goldie Goldbloom shows us the pains of being included and excluded, the delights of tradition, and the difficulties of coming to terms with oneself, of truly knowing one’s own deepest mind. This is a marvelous book by a masterful writer.
Goldie Goldbloom’s Surie is a character at once mythic and deeply human: a wise Chassidic elder in a youthful predicament, freighted by loss, denial, and blossoming hope. On Division is as beautiful as it is unexpected.
Reader, prepare thyself: you will soon be in Surie’s grip, and she will forever intrigue you with her fierceness and vulnerability, her honesty and self-deception, and her tender, brutal heart filled with both longing and rage. In this achingly suspenseful novel of satisfying psychological depth, Goldie Goldbloom asks what happens when the ones we know most intimately become strangers, and when one of those strangers is oneself.
What a marvel this novel is! Unsentimental, beautifully observed, rich in both joy and heartbreak, this is an indelible portrait of a remarkable woman embedded in a community pulsing with all the feelings and contradictions of a living faith.
A fifty-seven-year-old woman ― a Chassidic wife and mother and grandmother ― is pregnant with twins. Goldie Goldbloom offers us, out of the very specific and often unfamiliar, a woman to be known and loved by every reader. On Division is a novel of wisdom and uncertainty, of love in its greater and lesser forms, and of the struggle between how it should be and how it is. It is impossible not to be moved and surprised by Goldie Goldbloom.
Oh, this book! I feel that I have been waiting for this book all my reading life. Goldie Goldbloom creates a magnificently human woman in Surie Eckstein, unprepossessing, yet heroic in her determination to understand past tragedies, to face her own failings, and to improve. The moral complexities of this Chassidic community, lovingly and critically detailed, spring to life as complexities and challenges for us all, whatever our customs and beliefs. On Division is a triumph, and an essential one at that.
On Division by Goldie Goldbloom is a fabulous religious-themed literary fiction piece.
This novel is focussed mainly on Surie- a grandmother (soon to be great-grandmother), mother, wife, and fixture of her Chasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklynn.
Surie, much to the shock and horror she thinks, finds out that she is pregnant with twins.
This life-altering, seismic revelation shocks her to her core and brings up fundamental questions that she realizes were there all along during the 40ish years she has been married to her gentle Yidel.
This “awakening” and the aftershocks that occur afterwards is where this author takes the reader.
Being a part of something so personal and so raw feels like you are looking into your own soul, and maybe you are.
The struggles that she and Yidel face, in some form or another, we all face no matter what religion or geographical location we inhabit.
The imagery of the location and the descriptions of the raw emotions that the author paints for the reader are stunning.
I truly enjoyed this book, and honestly wished it could have been twice as long.
Truly amazing read.
5/5 stars.
This book provided an in-depth look at life within the insular Chassidic community. However, the third person perspective left me feeling no connection to the characters. I think I would have preferred a first person perspective for this story.
Surie, at the age of 57, is pregnant with twins. She already has 32 grandchildren. She fears for her family’s reputation. None of her peers have been pregnant within the past decade. Ashamed, she begins lying to her husband for the first time in their marriage. She and her children will be shunned if others find out about her pregnancy. I couldn’t really connect with Surie’s feelings given the narrative was an observation.
This book is good for people who have an interest in learning about the lives of the Chassid. Goldblum presents their lives in a very respectful manner, revealing the positives of such a close-knit community along with its negatives.
Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advance e-galley. Opinions expressed are my own.