Customer Reviews

Hester Among the Ruins (Harvest Book)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

A young Jewish-American historian going to Munich to do research on medieval traditions and customs - that's the seemingly harmless starting point of Binnie Kirshenbaum's new novel.

But the story soon takes a more dangerous twist when the ambitious and well assimilated Hester Rosenfeld who has so far only devoted herself to American colonial history falls in love with her German advisor, professor Heinrich Falk, who is twenty years older than her. On the spur of the moment she throws all caution to the wind and decides to write his biography as "a typical German" of the post-war generation, who was "born in the shadows of history", in Germany's darkness and shame.

This "project" which is part of a charming and innocent "folie à deux" is by its very nature bound to fail, but Binnie Kirshenbaum is a skilful and clever author who derives an amazing amount of insight from her first person narrator's futile attempts to deal with the horrors of the past and the oddities of the present. Not only does Hester Rosenfeld meet many quirky German characters in her quest, not only does she realize how much the feelings of guilt have created an uneasy mixture of shame and philosemitism in Germany, but she eventually becomes aware of her own Jewishness in ways that she didn't know about in her earlier life.

The result is a fascinating, dark, sexy novel, full of light, funny moments.

I've followed Binnie Kirshenbaum's earlier books with great enthusiasm, I loved 'Disturbance in one Place' and 'Pure Poetry', but there is no doubt that 'Hester' is her most political statement so far.

I heard Binnie Kirshenbaum read in Berlin and I got the impression that the German audience well appreciates the fact that there are American writers who are interested in the Old Continent, who listen to what people here have to say and who take the message back home.

Kirshenbaum delivers once again with her special blend of bittersweet romance, finely drawn characters and a protagonist for the ages. When Hester Rosenfeld comes to Munich to be with her older, intellectual German lover, and write his story, what follows is a complicated tale of love. Theirs is a relationship between people so simliar, yet opposite, with pasts that Kirshenbaum explores with dignity and hilarity all at once. Hester's observations of Munich, her investigation into her lover's life, and her independent yet devastatingly romantic spirit make her the perfect modern everywoman. This is a novel that tackles universal truths with a deft hand. Have you read Kirshenbaum's other novels? Start now and be forever grateful!

In this most elegantly written and constructed novel, the protagonist, Dr. Hester Rosenfeld is forced to confront her own Jewish identity as she pursues a love affair with a German professor twenty years her senior. Living in a small hotel in Munich in order to fulfill her role as the Other Woman, Hester denies the value of her own heritage, from rejecting her immigrant parents on. However, as an intelligent researcher she cannot avoid the questions about a Nazi connection to her lover/subject's past. This slowly leads Hester to acceptance of herself - and ultimately the moment of unresolvable conflict between German and Jew in the shadow of the Holocaust. This is a rich and complex exploration that is also entertaining and humorous. I highly recommend it!

I was so moved by this book; the story of an impossible or improbable love was achingly portrayed against the haunting legacy of the Holocaust. Yet, amazingly enough, much of it was really funny. It is also really intelligent without pretense. The technique of the collage effect with letters and pictures and quotes from history books added to the believability of the characters' professions and it also made for layers upon layers of things to think about. Amazing book. This is the best novel I've read in ages.

I loved this book, and I've read it three times. On my third read, I looked at the way Binnie Kirshbaum handled the nature of betrayal since she manages to explore almost every type of betrayal that exists: betrayal between lovers, betrayal of parents, betrayal of goverments, betrayal of memory, and, of course, the ultimate betrayal of life itself, death. Inevitably we can't live unless we are willing to accept betrayal in every aspect of our lives. Though this sounds pessimistic, the book is very funny and optimistically points out how we live with everything on which we cannot count.

This is a brilliant book, which is both funny and sad. If you read the book twice,the funny becomes sad, and the sad becomes funny--it's that kind of book--like a prism--and if you keep rereading it--the patterns change. In one way, this is a love story that can't escape history. A Jewish woman and a German man are bound to enter into a cultural conflict at some point. In another sense, however, this is the story of a relationship that we've all had. It's not enough to love--rather one has to go digging around for facts that will destroy love, and even if the facts really don't--we'll make an argument that they do. This book indicts both the historical past and the postmodern state of the heart. I highly recommend this book!

Great story, great premise, but I LOVE the way this book is written. I love the whole idea of it: doing a biography of your lover (not a past lover, a current one). Imagine if your lover opened up his whole life to you--let you interview friends, relatives,ex-wives and girlfriends, gave you access to old letters, so you could see the whole picture, not just one side of the story. This book is brilliant. Not only do I want to read it again, but I want to conduct my own research a la Hester.

This perceptive and intelligent novel tells the story of a Jewish American woman setting out to find a Germany of her own. She falls in love with her subject in the shape of a professor of history born in 1943 and questions both him and his country to finally find truth -ultimately not about him, but about herself and her parents as well. Unlikely enough this story is a dark comedy - bitter and funny and heart-breaking.

To tell a compelling and dangerous story with a narrative voice that is at turns capricious, sexy, and humorous is a great gift, and Kirshenbaum captivates us with her many gifts in HESTER AMONG THE RUINS, opening a window upon a collision of two worlds that is at turns frightening, exhilarating, and sinister, while luring us into an odyssey of personal discovery that is captivating and forceful. When you finish this novel you may turn it over and start it again. HESTER AMONG THE RUINS continues the strong legacy of Kirshenbaum's previous work, including her 2000 offering, PURE POETRY, a title which aptly describes this gifted author's splendid prose.

Best not to try to label Binnie Kirshenbaum's fourth novel, "Hester Among the Ruins" (2002). The narrator, Hester Rosenfeld, bright, highly sexed, with a brand new PhD, the daughter of parents who were run out of Hitler's Germany just in time to escape the death camps, becomes so enraptured with Heinrich Falk, a handsome, German academic born during World War II, that she signs on as his mistress without blinking an eye. She moves to Munich to be with him, then spends the rest of the novel digging into his past (on the pretext of writing his biography) to make sure that he does not share culpability for her parents' expulsion from Germany and for the Holocaust in general. Too thought-provoking to be a romance, too romantic to be a Holocaust novel and too polemic to be more conventional literary fiction, "Hester Among the Ruins" demonstrates what a writer of Kirshenbaum's ability can do with these ingredients.

Kirshenbaum warmed to the task in her prior novel, "Pure Poetry", in which the Jewish narrator first has an affair with, then marries and ultimately divorces her German lover before divorcer's remorse sets in and she seeks, too late, to win him back. In "Poetry" as in "Ruins, the narrator's conflict comes down to one of the most basic questions facing her generation: how could a good Jewish girl ever get in bed with a German, particularly one whose parents were Nazis, let alone take up with him for life.

Kirshenbaum complicates the task for readers of "Ruins" by dividing the text visually and narratively into three components: the text, in standard type, which carries and develops the story line; Hester's research notes, quotations from the secondary sources which are inserted in italics (as are frequent quotations from Heinrich's love letters); and, finally, asides to herself, often lengthy italicized memoranda of her reflections about her lover, his family, and his habits. Whatever the technique accomplishes (she comes up with any number of fascinating tidbits, e.g. from "The Year 1000": "The regulations of the tenth-century European monastery prescribed five baths for every monk per year....") these inserts make for a choppy row across a wind-swept lake.

If the book falls short in its goal to convincingly present the excruciating dilemma faced by a Holocaust-conditioned Jewish girl who falls for a German with, albeit attenuated, ties to the Nazi regime, it is because Hester is too sex struck to be a fully credible Holocaust witness. Hester's lustfulness calls into question her depth of character. Even so, the question raised is elemental, its treatment thoughtful, and the ultimate resolution credible.

End note. This concludes my series of Amazon book reviews of Kirshenbaum's six novels and 1995 collection of stories, "History on a Personal Note." Her earlier book of stories, "Married Life and Other True Adventures" (1990), published when the author was in her mid-twenties, is, at best, predictive of the work to come. It can not hold its own with her later books of which my favorite, "The Scenic Route" (2009), shows her at the top of her game. Ms. Kirshenbaum chairs the creative writing program at Columbia University where I urge you to audit her classes if you have the opportunity. Full disclosure: she is a friend of a friend.