Support us as we prepare for our 73rd National Jewish Book Awards Celebration! This package includes 2 VIP tickets to our NJBA Dinner and Awards Presentation on March 26, 2024 in New York City & a copy of the National Jewish Book Award-winning novel, The Weight of Ink, with a personalized note from the author Rachel Kadish. VIP tickets include entry for two to the VIP pre-reception with the award-winning authors, the dinner reception, the awards ceremony, and dessert. In addition, the package includes Editors’ Circle membership benefits to Jewish Book Council.
Description of piece:
National Jewish Book Awards:
Inaugurated in 1950, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind and is recognized as the most prestigious. The Awards are intended to recognize authors, and encourage reading, of outstanding English-language books of Jewish interest.
Awards are presented in over eighteen categories, and the winning authors are celebrated at an annual gala in the year following the publication of the books under consideration.
The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish
"An intellectual and emotional jigsaw puzzle of a novel for readers of A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.” Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work of historical fiction about women separated by centuries, and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind."
Artist bio:
Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Slate, Salon, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere. She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston.