The Rabbi's Suitcase
Jerusalem, 1926. She is seventeen, the eldest of seven, and expected to spend her life raising her mother's children. Then she meets Reuven.
Zipora Siev is born into Jerusalem's Orthodox world, where a girl learns enough arithmetic to keep house and enough Hebrew to pray. Her grandparents, Yosef and Chana, came as children on an overcrowded steamship from Lithuania, bound for the Holy City. Reuven, a well-educated young Lithuanian immigrant, has no patience for the old rules.
Their affair is forbidden and passionate, and in British Mandate Palestine it is dangerous. Pregnant and unmarried, Zipora risks her life on an illegal abortion.
In 1928 Reuven leaves to study in Strasbourg, later Paris; in time he will become an ally of David Ben-Gurion and a founder of the State of Israel. Zipora sails alone to New York, arriving the week of the 1929 crash, determined to earn enough to keep him at the Sorbonne and bring her family to America. His letters follow her across the ocean: tender, explicit, and increasingly certain about what a woman should not want. A job. An education. A life of her own.
Robert Kehlmann built this novel from real history and a trove of intimate letters found among his mother's belongings after her death. It is a love story, a family saga, and a portrait of a young woman deciding who she will be.
For readers of Pachinko, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem and The Stationery Shop.
Winner of the 2026 NYC Big Book Award - JudaismWinner of the 2026 American Legacy Book Awards - Best New FictionWinner of the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Award - Historical Fiction (1900s)"Carries the weight of generations while making one woman's right to her own future feel urgent and personal." - Literary Titan
"A poignant, informative portrait of Jewish life." - Kirkus Reviews
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