Customer Reviews

The Bone Weaver: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Victoria Zackheim's The Bone Weaver is a superbly written generational story, told from great-grandmother to grandmother to mother, about their lives and problems in struggling to survive and endure in 19th century eastern Europe despite pogroms, diseases, and other ills that befall life in the Jewish shetl. The history of past survivors helps present day descendent Mimi Zilber better understand herself, where she comes from, and how to best set her sights on the future. The Bone Weaver is a unique, powerful, moving, inspiring, and very highly recommended novel.

I adored this novel. I was lost in the world of these three powerful women and the threads of their lives. Psychologically astute and beautifully written, this makes me long for more works by the talented Zackheim.

This is a very original story by a gifted writer. After the death of her close friend, Mimi struggles to regain her emotional equilibrium, wondering why she is having such a hard time. She hopes to find some answers by retracing her family history, especially since she comes from a long line of courageous women. What was their secret of survival? And why has she resisted intimacy in her own life?

The story shifts back and forth between Mimi's present and her ancestors' past. The description of life in the shtetl is the best I have read. Mimi's journey is both emotional and analytical, and the reader empathizes with her sadness and depression. Happily, she arrives at a place of acceptance and compassion, both for herself and for her very difficult and rejecting mother. As for her relationship with Daniel, perhaps her defenses have been lowered enough for some chemistry to happen between them. At the end of the book we sense that some inner healing has occurred. It's a start, and the author does us a favor by leaving the story there. As in life, there are no guarantees for Mimi, but the story ends on a note of hope.

The interwoven generational stories were very powerful and the grief in the book is palatable. I wanted to take Mimi, the main character by the hand and talk to her, and promise her that the pain would go away.

The author has achieved something very real and true with this book. It is a haunting story of grief, missed loved, and the nature of healing.

A gorgeous, deeply moving exploration of grief and the stories that ultimately sustain us. Zackheim plumbs both the inner and outer worlds with great sensitivity and grace.

Ms. Zackheim must be carrying a sense of past generations somewhere in her DNA. I'm not sure her scholarly research skills alone, or her talent as a writer, could explain the compelling portrayals in The Bone Weaver. I was moved to tears more than once as this author made me know the pain, loneliness, and fear of her characters. Transitions were executed smoothly as the reader is transported back and forth between contemporary California and late 19th Century Russia. I will recommend this book to all my friends who are readers of good literature.

This is one of those books that the author just had to write, and I'd guess it must be at least partly autobiographical. The inability of children to understand their parents as people isn't new, but nevertheless, this isn't a bad story and it's quite readable - don't try it if you're depressed, though, as the gloom is pretty well unremitting, and you can easily miss the happy bits if you're a quick reader.

The characters are rather two-dimensional, and I found it hard to empathize with Mimi, the heroine. The two threads of the story, separated by around a century, are quite skilfully drawn together by the author, but I felt I didn't really get to know any of the characters very well, or to understand their emotions, which was pretty crucial to the whole experience!

There were some irritating inconsistencies in the story which a good proofreader should have picked up, and I also found it annoying that in a book that's clearly written from a Jewish perspective, the author didn't think to use the correct terms for Jewish items, e.g. she uses "siddurs" instead of "siddurim".

Definitely worth reading, but I hope that if Victoria Zackheim produces another book, she takes a different tack - a little angst can go a long way!

Professor Mimi Zilber is the last in a line of strong-willed, courageous Jewish women. Though her days are peopled by colleagues, students, a patient suitor, and her aging mother, the death of her lifelong best friend has cut her adrift from any true intimacy. Compelled by grief and isolation, Mimi begins reflecting on the lives of her great-grandmother, her grandmother, and her mother. As she contemplates the terrors and losses these women endured, she finally locates her kinship with them and learns that it resides in her own courage -- the courage to heal, the courage to love even her querulous and difficult mother, and the courage to allow herself be loved.
Though Mimi's story derives from the bitter abuses that Jews have suffered in the past century or more, its overarching theme of pain, healing, and history applies to any person and any people. This is one of the great strengths of Victoria Zackheim's moving and well-written novel. We can all gain strength and humility by considering our forebears, making them real to us, and measuring ourselves against their accomplishments and the debts we owe to them.

This book popped out at me in a secondhand shop in San Francisco...the main character in this book begins her soulful mental drifting after the death of a dear girlfriend...Even the title does not tell what the books about, for it attracted me as perhaps a Chinese word for a "doctor" who knits bones back together.The cover itself shows some very dour East European Jewish women, symbolic of the author's own Ashkenazi roots. The author decides that the source of loneliness, life confusion, and subsequent lack of a life partner in this tough main character, Mimi, stems from her own Jewish rootlessness, from the miserable shtetl lives of her ancestors. Mimi, the grieving single woman, is portrayed as successful and driver, who is unable to appreciate her long-suffering, ever-clinging, never-giving up boyfriend. She simply has no great desire, let alone love for him, but appreciates that he always comes around and gently prods her into a lunch or dinner or drive around the Santa Monica area. Meanwhile, Mimi, well-respected by colleagues, lets herself be torn apart by her Jewish aging mother who criticizes and intervenes with her daughter's life, showing disregard for her career and interests. All she cares about is that her past-her-prime only child get married. This drives Mimi insane yet she continues, out of guilt, to visit her 80-plus widowed mother incessantly. The book revolves around these visits and the emotional damage that they cause Mimi, in spite of all else that goes right with her life. She cannot bring herself out of her my-best-friend-died stupor, abulia and lethargy.I found this a painfully true book for any woman who loses a dear and understanding friend, with whom she can talk freely. Mothers, alas, whether Jewish or gentile, seem harsh on their daughters in some universally antagonistic way...Luckily for Mimi, she's an only child, or is that unlucky? There's no brother-jealousy to contend with.The book will rip any woman's heart who's gone through a loss. I am not sure a man would find it so convincing, especially those parts to do with the long-suffering always-repelled beau.The weakness of the story is the delving into the Jewish side, so that if you are Jewish, you are caught up in thoughts of judenrein villages and pogroms and Jew-hatred in Russia/Poland. If you are not Jewish, you slip past these bits with either a knowing glance (here's this theme again) or as too-alien, too-far-back misery...The writer could have written the story, a story which rings true and powerful, as one half-- that of grief for a friend. The theme of marriage, finding a mate late in life, and an obnoxious mother could be salvaged, since many could relate, but Mimi's own life, interests and accomplishments could have been drummed up more, to show us who she really was - aside from the dead friend, the persistent boyfriend and the mother. If she is in her 40's, why no real description of her life? This could pull a reader in, especially professional people who could relate to an intellectual bent. AFter the character of Mimi is better explored, then more emphasis on the cranky and troubled mother could be opened up. We are plunged in too fast.When Mimi finally comes to a resolution, the predictable "Happy-End" of accepting a marriage proposal of luke-warm love on her side, then the second part of the book could delve into the mysteries of the mother and her endless, obnoxious qvetching. It could thereby independently explore the Jewish culture in the USA as it's been tempered by 19th-C. misery and Jew-hatred, and those effects on individual immigrant women, who then have fostered this middle-aged generation of confused-in-love professional, wary women. Not to mention that the male-dominated Jewish religion caused many Jewish women hardship!I found it too much to switch back and forth between the generations since I cared really only about Mimi. In grief, perhaps I didn't see the virtue of the interweaving...Therefore I did not take Zackbein's generational analysis so seriously...all who read this, of short time in consumerism multiculti USA, could relate to the Jewish part of the story. Don't let its foreignness and long-gone-ness put you off.For a story about grief, the parts about Mimi are excellent.

I really wanted to like this book -- in fact, I wanted to love it. Instead I found myself sunk in a repetitive bog that took me days to convince myself to finish. The main character is, I'm sorry, a total bore, and the premise is ridiculous. Mimi's grief at the death of her best friend was moving for the first chapter or two, but beyond that, it was more of the same, chapter after chapter. If I were Daniel, her patient friend, I would have tossed her out on her rear! How exactly did Mimi discover her family history? Just from the bits and pieces her mother told her? But there was so much her mother didn't know, and there weren't any family letters or diaries to read. Characters disappear -- whatever happened to Mimi's mother's two brothers? -- and reappear -- Mimi's grandmother's cousin leaves home when she runs away from her abusive husband, unable to obtain a Jewish divorce from him, yet reappears a hundred pages later, the mother of a daughter, with no explanation. Where was she? Did she marry again? Ages and history don't gibe or make sense; did this book have an editor?

What we have here is a workmanlike first draft of a novel that should have been revised before it ever saw the light of day.