Louisa

By Simone Zelitch

Book Overview

This award-winning novel takes readers to postwar Israel, introducing them to a mother and daughter-in-law with an unusual relationship and offering a unique perspective on Jewish identity and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399146598
• ISBN13: 9780399146596
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

The Song of Louisa, Brilliant!

"Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God." This was Ruth's pledge to her mother-in-law Naomi. She offers complete loyality, even though her husband is dead, even though Naomi urgers her to return to her kinsmen. Flash forward a couple thousand years, give or take a few and Simone Zelitch has written a beautiful novel based on the story of Ruth. It is just after the Second World War. Nora has just arrived in Palistine with her daughter-in-law Louisa in tow. During the last days of the war in Budapest, Louisa hid Nora from the Germans in her celler. The war has taken Nora's husband and her son, Ruth's husband as well. Nora's only family is a cousin in the Holy Land and it's there that Nora goes. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that Louisa is German. So she is immidiately suspect by the others in the camp where they have to live. The people in the camp, including the rabbi and other officials want Louisa to go back to Germany, but she refuses. Like Ruth of old, she is going to both cleave to and support Nora. Which she does. And like Ruth, Louisa wants to convert. She works hard and in a couple months masters Herbrew, something Nora never does. Louisa is determined and optimistic. Nora comes across as bitter, lonely and lost and at times one wonders how Louisa can go on, but she has her own agenda, one that is both admirable and devious. This story, which seems at times almost a mystery, is a story about loyality, love gained and love lost. It is wonderfully told and not easily forgotten. It takes place in a sad time, but it promises a better future. It's a book everybody should read.

Excellent piece of fiction

For the past fifteen years or so, Hungarian Jew Nora Gratz has lived a harsh life with her husband missing for more than a decade and her son now dead. She detests her daughter-in-law Louisa, daughter of die hard German Nazis, but family is family. Truth be told, Louisa is the only reason Nora survived the holocaust because she hid her mother-in-law from the Nazis after her spouse died. In 1949 Nora, accompanied by her daughter in law, Louisa immigrates to Israel. However, her cousin fails to meet her at the Haifa docks. Nora and Louisa live in a camp where Holocaust survivors treat the younger woman with hatred and contempt. Willing to convert to Judaism, Louisa remains an abomination to the embittered survivors of Europe. LOUISA, the retelling of the biblical story of Ruth, is an extraordinary work because Simone Zelitch provides perceptiveness into the parallel stories. Readers will feel a sense of time and place through the characters. Readers obtain a feel for the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s in Hungary as well as a taste of 1949 Israel. The characters are drawn relatively simplistically and unsympathetically, but surprisingly that provides deeper insight into relationships, especially that of Nora and Louisa. The ultimate accolade to the author is that the audience will take a fresh look at the Ruth-Naomi tale.Harriet Klausner

A hard-core work of art...

Here's what Beth Kephart @ BALTIMORE SUN wrote in her book review this week: "LOUISA is a smart, ironic, original and structurally sophisticated, a hard-core work of art... The subject at hand is exiles - from country, from idealism, from love... Zelitch uses a complicated stitch to weave the past and present together. She also endows Nora, her chain-smoking narrator, with an impossible omniscience, enabling her to fill in the blanks with anecdotes, details, revelations she'd have no way of ever knowing. Even so...LOUISA remains a masterful concoction, as Zelitch never breaks the spell of disillusionment that binds the story's seemingly dozens of subplots.

Impressive

This book consumed my every free moment for three days. Being very familiar with the biblical story of Ruth, I thought the novel might be too predictable- but I was wrong. The intense characterizations, detail you can almost smell, and narrative pull combined to provide a very satisfying read.

An extraordinary journey

Louisa is a brilliant novel, both captivating and intriguing. The characters are well developed and believable. I highly recommend this book.