My first novel, When Angels Left the Old Country, takes a historical story that’s familiar to many Americans—immigration through Ellis Island around the turn of the 20th century—and casts it as a fairy tale inspired by Jewish folklore. I knew I couldn’t repeat the same setting for my next work. A second book is always challenging, and there was a lot of pressure in following a debut that received six(!) awards and honors. For a fresh start I chose a story that still draws on Jewish folklore and history, but was constrained within a single invented town, at a less familiar moment in history.
The Forbidden Book is a supernatural murder mystery set in the 1870s, before the great wave of migration that began circa 1880 out of the Pale of Settlement, the region where Jews were allowed permanent residency under the restrictions of the Russian Empire. At this time Jewish books were highly censored, but there was a growing political consciousness, and a growing desire for education among Jewish women. The communities of Eastern Europe were subject to a whirlwind of forces on the sides of both tradition and change. I researched the period using historical works such as Michael Stanislawski’s Murder in Lemberg, which explores the attempted poisoning of a Reform rabbi by another Jew in the mid-1800s. Working within this setting allowed me to emphasize Jewish agency with a story whose actors are nearly all Jewish, and are all acting in the interests of their community—but are in conflict about what those interests are.
The Forbidden Book is also a dybbuk story. The dybbuk is usually described as the spirit of a deceased person that can possess the living and speak through them. As in the case of S. An-sky’s 1920 play The Dybbuk (perhaps the most famous work of Yiddish theater), traditional dybbuk stories have a gendered aspect. Many of them describe young women possessed by male spirits, sometimes male Torah scholars, which allowed young women constrained by patriarchy to access male authority while speaking in the voice of the possessor. My protagonist, Sorel, is a young girl who escapes her unwanted marriage under a male identity, only to discover the name she’s using belongs to a real boy—and using his name has plunged her into the midst of a complex web of intrigues.
Sorel and her dybbuk, Isser, have to work together to solve the mystery of his death and prevent a supernatural calamity. At the same time, each is negotiating their relationship with Kalman Senderovitch (who is Sorel’s father and Isser’s father figure), and Isser helps Sorel learn what she truly wants from her life. The personal narrative, augmented by spooky encounters with Angels of Death and sinister black dogs, is intended to help draw my teen audience through the story of censorship, feminism and social activism. I hope that the universal themes of friendship, family and self-expression will introduce readers to a new chapter in history and a very human view of the Jewish past.