The Weight of Ink

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Prologue-Chapter 9

Part 2, Chapters 10-13

Part 3, Chapters 14-18

Part 3, Chapters 19-21

Part 4, Chapters 22-26

Part 5, Chapters 27-34

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Choosing Risk Over Caution

Many characters in the novel are forced to make choices about whether or not to take a risk. While not all risks are rewarded in the novel and there is sometimes a price to pay, the narrative shows that characters who make bolder choices experience greater fulfillment.

The central risk in the plot is Ester’s decision to secretly write her own thoughts and ideas and send them to other thinkers and philosophers. Ester feels hesitation about the risk because she fears hurting Rabbi Mendes, and as Aaron and Helen later discuss, she risked social ostracism and potential imprisonment and death for her radical ideas. Ester’s risk is thrown into sharp relief because she is urged to choose a safer path (marrying a respectable man) and repeatedly turns down marriage offers from Manuel HaLevy. Even though she could take a more cautious path, Ester risks everything so that she can express herself and her ideas. At the end of her life, she is unrepentant about this choice, declaring that “the world and I have sinned against each other” (529).

While Ester’s plotline explores the dangers and costs of someone who risks everything in pursuit of living an authentic life, other characters are shown either at the crossroads of a significant choice, or looking back with regret. When Helen was a young woman, she faced a choice that parallels Ester’s choice: She could take the risk of committing to a life with a man with a very different cultural background, or she could choose the safer path of living in a familiar place and focusing her energies on her own career. While Helen has had a fulfilling life as a scholar, she always looks back with regret to what might have been if she had been brave enough to follow her heart. She eventually laments “how fearsome a thing was love. She’d wasted her life fleeing it” (453).

Meanwhile, Aaron is wrestling with his professional and personal future, and he cannot commit to a vision of the kind of man he wants to be. He learns to be more comfortable with taking risks by pursuing the nebulous project of trying to learn more about the documents—this project pushes him out of his comfort zone, and allows him to learn from Helen’s single-minded pursuit of a goal. By the end of the novel, Aaron has matured into someone who can take the risk of telling Marisa that he wants to be with her and raise their child together.

While Ester and Aaron seem to be rewarded for taking risks and following their hearts, and Helen is left regretting the risks she did not take, the plot of the novel also shows that some characters suffer as a result of the risks they take. Notably, Mary suffers tragic consequences as a result of her sexual relationship with Thomas Morrow. Generations earlier, Ester’s grandmother, Lizabeta, also largely suffered as a result of having an adulterous relationship with an unnamed Englishman.

However, the individuals who suffer as a result of the risks they take are shown to be individuals who either take reckless risks, or who take risks for a reward that is unworthy of them. Ester cautions Mary a number of times that Thomas does not seem to sincerely care for her; both Thomas and Lizabeta’s lover also occupy much more socially-privileged positions as men and Christians, and they treat their Jewish lovers as disposable because they cannot understand their vulnerability. The juxtaposition of these storylines reveals that taking risks is important, but only in the service of truly understanding one’s own self and staying true to one’s most important values.

Love of Learning and Scholarship

In both the 16th-century and 21st-century storylines, some characters feel an intense attraction to learning and scholarship. Rabbi Mendes and Spinoza both devote their lives to the scholarly pursuit of philosophy and theology. More importantly, although she has to do so covertly, Ester also chooses to devote her life to engaging in intellectual discourse. She loves writing and ideas so much that she cannot live without access to reading and writing, even though this choice jeopardizes her entire future.

Aaron and Helen reflect that when Ester lacked intellectual exchange, “they’d witnessed Ester Velasquez starving in plain sight” (508), but that later, “that wild, insistent loneliness had at last been sated” (508). Ester’s passion for learning and scholarship is just as intense as the ambition that drives men like Rabbi Mendes and Spinoza, but because she is a woman, she faces many additional obstacles. Nonetheless, writing and ideas are the true love of Ester’s life: In her final confession, she comments that “love is not my fate” (529). In this statement, Ester means romantic love, but she does not acknowledge that she has indeed had a great love in her life: the love for learning and thinking.

Aaron and Helen are both also intensely devoted to learning, but have a more complicated relationship with their scholarly work because it is a profession for them. They have both made some significant sacrifices in order to pursue their scholarly careers. Aaron reflects that “in the place of religion and all that went with it […] he’d set history” (55). Helen also sometimes sees her scholarly career as compensation for the sacrifice she made when she decided not to pursue a relationship with Dror. Similar to Ester, Helen has not known true love, and has focused on a life of the mind instead.

However, Aaron and Helen do not pursue the life of the mind purely for its own sake; they are animated by a modern ambition to achieve and be recognized as the best in their field. Especially in Helen’s case, since she is coming to the end of her career and her ability to do scholarly work due to her illness, she is competitive and possessive about Ester’s story. While thinkers like Ester and Spinoza have to contend with whether their ideas are too radical and innovative, Aaron and Helen face the pressure of modern academics to come up with discoveries that are groundbreaking enough to be considered significant. While pursuing somewhat different ends, all of these characters are united across historical and cultural gaps in a shared love of knowledge above all else.

Barriers Between Individuals From Different Cultures and Beliefs

Throughout the novel, individuals from different cultural backgrounds enter each other’s orbits and encounter challenges due to their different ways of seeing the world. While they can collaborate and learn from each other, the novel does not often depict anyone from different cultural backgrounds successfully forming enduring active relationships. In chronological order, some of the individuals who interact across cultural backgrounds are: Lizabeta and her English lover, Mary and Thomas Farrow, Ester and John Tilbury, Helen and Dror, and (in a non-romantic collaboration) Helen and Aaron. All of these pairings feature one individual who is Jewish and one who is not; in the final case, Helen and Aaron experience an additional cultural barrier since the former is British and the latter is American.

Of the romantic relationships, some are sincerer than others. For example, Helen and Dror genuinely love each other and respect each other’s differences, while it is clear to everyone that Thomas treats Mary like an exotic novelty and has an avaricious interest in her family’s wealth. However, none of the pairings are able to bridge their cultural differences to successfully pursue a partnership. While John seems to truly love Ester, he is unwilling to risk his future and his conventional life: He abandons her and eventually confides to her later, “I leaned as far as a man may lean into a void of newness before he recalls his obligation to remain who he is” (518). Likewise, Helen is deeply in love with Dror, but fears that he will never be able to put her above his commitment to his Jewish identity and history. Referring to the mass suicide event at Masada (See: Symbols & Motifs), she laments that, “if we had been there, he would have cut my throat” (218). Whether the plot unfolds in the 20th or 17th century, cultural and religious divides are presented as too vast for even true love to overcome. Relationships like the ones between Ester and Alvaro, or even Aaron and Marisa, are presented as imperfect, but their shared Jewish heritage provides them with a shared cultural context to build upon.

Interestingly, the one active cross-cultural pairing that proves enduring and functional is the non-romantic, professional partnership between Helen and Aaron. Helen and Aaron in some ways have the greatest divide: Helen is British and not Jewish, and also decades older than Aaron. The two of them frequently grate on one another, with Helen seeing Aaron as arrogant and entitled, and Aaron perceiving Helen as cold and rigid. Aaron also challenges Helen’s choice to study and write about Jewish history without being Jewish herself. Despite these differences, Helen and Aaron eventually develop mutual respect and affection. By the end of the novel, Aaron reflects that “he loved [Helen] as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it” (509). Perhaps because their friendship is based in a mutual project, respect for each other’s competency, and non-romantic affection, Helen and Aaron are able bypass the barriers that make it impossible for the other couples to form a successful relationship.

There is also one other successful cross-cultural connection, albeit one that is not active and direct. Despite their differences in terms of historical era and cultural background, Helen feels a close kinship with Ester as she pieces together her story through the discovered documents. Helen and Ester are both women committed to learning: While Helen is able to make a successful professional career in scholarship in the 21st century, Ester must pursue her intellectual interests covertly. Both women also make the painful choice to forgo romantic love in order to prioritize their quests for knowledge. At the novel’s end, learning about Ester’s death and final confession gives Helen the peace she needs to reconcile herself with what happened with Dror and to accept her own death, enabling the two women to both mirror one another in their experiences and to forge a bond that, although indirect, enables the barriers of time, place, and culture to be momentarily transcended.