Libby's Reviews > The Weight of Ink

4.5 rounded up - In ‘The Weight of Ink,’ author Rachel Kadish explores themes that would be important to many readers. How do we live an authentic life while also exploring and paying homage to the life of the mind? What if the life of the mind is your passion? For two women in this book, Ester Velasques, and Helen Watt, such is the case. Ester comes of age in the late 1650s. She and her brother, Isaac, are orphans that Rabbi HaCoen Mendes take with him to London to set up a learning center for the Jewish community there. When Isaac abdicates the role of the Rabbi’s scribe, Ester is called upon. Ester’s father had seen to it that she was educated, but many if not most in the Jewish community feel that the world of learning is no place for a woman. Still, Rabbi Mendes uses her skills as his scribe.

Over three centuries later, Helen Watt, historian and academic, is called to the home of a former student, to investigate a cache of documents found behind a stairwell. Her assistant, Aaron Levy, who is working on his post doctoral dissertation, rounds out the cast of main characters. Aaron and Helen rub each other the wrong way. Helen is implacable and stiff, showing very little emotion. She is also on the edge of retirement, which is another one of those milestones that make the ground shake. Aaron’s dissertation is flagging as is his understanding of what direction his life should now take. He begins to question his own need for approval and compliments as he moves up the academic escalator. I found the dynamic between these two characters incredibly interesting. As their university makes arrangements to buy the papers, a competition and urgency to be first to publish using the new sources will arise.

This novel is a slow burn, but one that pleasantly pulled me into its webs of intrigue. Ester’s right to academia, her right to live a life of scholarship are constantly called into question. She loves the Rabbi, but the more she learns, the more she questions. Like the Rabbi’s old student, Baruch de Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Portugese community at the age of twenty-three, she begins to question the nature of God. She hides these thoughts from her teacher but wonders why scholarship doesn’t embrace these questions rather than repudiating the questioners.

Ester's passion was the life of the mind, as was Helen’s. An intellectual awakening is a flowering of possibilities, a quickening of the spirit, the inner being coming alive to stretch and grow in previously undreamed of ways. It is more than academia because although it may be fostered by it, this kind of awakening is fulfilled by the seeker’s own heat seeking pulse. The quest of the seeker becomes its own Holy Grail. And yet, these two women paid a price. An excellent novel with great depth and rich characters that caused me to think about my inner life, and yes, at times, what I give in exchange.