Jane Isenberg

The Bones and the Book Jane Isenberg

In 1890, Aliza Rudinsk, a young Orthodox Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, came to Seattle via New York's Lower East Side expecting to build a good life for herself. When Aliza's bones turn up in Seattle's underground streets in 1965 along with a book written in Yiddish, recently widowed empty nester Rachel Mazursky offers to translate the book. Aliza's surprising and poignant story compels Rachel to search for clues to the identity of the young woman's murderer, but her quest for the truth unearths disturbing secrets about her own past as well as Aliza's. The Bones and the Book carries the reader back to a far-flung outpost of the Jewish diaspora where gold, good table manners, and assimilating often trump Torah, tribe, and tradition. "Isenberg's story pulled me in right from the startling prologue. The twin historical stories of Aliza and Rachel are compelling and poignant. The lives of these women in 1900 and 1965 are beautifully woven together, the strands balancing each other as each discovers her strengths and revises her own identity as a woman and a Jew." - Sharan Newman, author of The Shanghai Tunnel