The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Houghton Mifflin. New.. New Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2018-06-05 New RACHEL KADISH is the award-winning author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, and of the novella I Was Here Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House She lives in the Boston area

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history

When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents' scribe, the elusive "Aleph"

Electrifying and ambitious, The Weight of Ink is about women separated by centuries-and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind