Our Little Histories - Review

Our Little Histories
By Janice Weizman
Published by Toby Press, Aug 2023
Amazon: $17.23, Paperback, 238 pages

Reviewed by Michal Kramer

In 2012, Janice Weizman wrote an award-winning historical novel The Wayward Moon, which was a well-received book about Rahel, a Jewish girl in 9th century CE Babylon.

Now Weizman has turned her attention to more current Jewish experiences in Eastern Europe, Belarus, Vilna, Israel, Palestine, and America, from 1850 thru 2015. Our Little Histories is a lovely collection of seven long short stories.

I am not a big fan of short stories. When I do read them, I usually feel they aren't complete and that there is more to tell. I don't want to read between the lines and try to guess what the author mean - but not in Our Little Histories. Not only is the writing descriptive but concise, the characters were well developed. I ended up liking almost all of them. I even ended up liking the American Jewish hippie cousin who said while visiting Israel in 1968, "Man, I just don't get the way everybody is cool with the draft here."

Each story is complete by itself. Each tells a story about a particular Jewish family within a particular event, and yet each tale tells part of the Ashkenazi Jewish story of the 19th-21st centuries.

There is also a connecting thread within each story - a blue journal, published in Yiddish in the old country, with a poem written by one female R. Shulman. Of course we are intrigued by this journal and how it is part of each story, but My Little Histories is not about the characters in each story finally solving the mystery of R. Shulman. Eventually, we do find out about her, even though the journal is mostly incidental to the telling of each family's story during a specific time in Jewish history.

In the first story, Reality, secular Jessica and her teenage daughter from Chicago, spend two weeks with religious Israeli cousins in Belarus during 2015. In Encounter, a very unaware American cousin visits her Holocaust survivor family on a kibbutz in1968; in Tragedy, Gabriel stays in 1939 Vilna, despite the pleas from Tamar to come to that "Zionistic swamp" [Mandate Palestine]. In Theater Tickets, Nat, in Chicago 1938, deals with immigrant parents and his German Jewish girlfriend whose family has been in America for 60 years; in Separation, a Talmud student living in a shtetl in 1896 Belarus spends time with long-lost family in the big city of Minsk, where he encounters a very different Jewish life.

By the last story, Three Fathers, which begins in 1850 Belarus, the reader will have been taken on a Jewish journey through the years. The stories could be similar to the reader's own family history. It is definitely a part of the Jewish Peoples history, our shared destiny as Jews.

This was a very enjoyable, poignant read. I recommend Our Little Histories by Janice Weizman. She has written a familiar story in a different way.