The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish

A review by Justine Hemmestad

Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink is a novel whose characters feel as alive as the ideas they wrestle with, as though they relive the Torah first-hand — so alive that they seem to push against the edges of the centuries between them. 

A USA Today bestseller and winner of a 2017 National Jewish Book Award, The Weight of Ink reveals itself in two intertwined timelines, both of which are held together by the force of one extraordinary mind - Ester Velasquez. She flows between both timelines: she writes in the 17th Century timeline, while she's read in the 21st Century timeline. This gives her words an immortality that the reader is captivated by.

Kadish’s descriptions of memories, inclusive of smells, are fully immersive in the 17th Century Jewish Community of London, as are her descriptions of the fragility of the antique letters in the 21st Century, inclusive of Portuguese and Hebrew, which is a testament to her exquisite writing.

Ester’s writing, which is discovered centuries after she lived, ignites an academic pursuit of her hidden brilliance as well as reveals the intriguing possibility that she may have brushed the world of Shakespeare. “Nay, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it,” the beginning of The Weight of Ink mirrors the opening couplet of Sonnet 71.

I loved this aspect of the story because my family lineage leads to Shakespeare on several branches, among countless other crypto, or hidden, Jews. There is so much history pertaining to Jewish London in this story that I find myself trying to locate my own ancestors among Kadish’s fictional characters.

Kadish threads her story through time with a devotion to her characters that reveals how deeply she invests in them; she is meticulous in exploring their thoughts, fears, and yearnings. Truly, the novel feels like a dialogue between past and present as much as it does between people.

Ester’s life in 1660s London is shaped by exile, danger, and a brilliance she must hide (much like Judaism itself had to be hidden in England). If fact, she feels a kinship of mind with Spinoza, who she recalls had been banished from the Netherlands for suggesting that God and Nature may be the same.

A Jewish orphan from Amsterdam, Ester becomes the scribe to Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes, a blind scholar who had been tortured in the Inquisition.  I love how her character’s writing story begins with a humble insecurity, a bottle of spilled ink, yet she’s bound to script by the Rabbi’s faith in her ability. “The words he spoke, streamed through her hand,” Kadish writes.

Although publicly Ester appears to be nothing more than a servant (reminiscent of Luzia Cotado, protagonist of The Familiar), in secret she is the rabbi’s intellectual student, composing letters and documents under the disguised signature “Aleph.” The London Ester lives in is one in which plague and fire barrel through the corridors, antisemitism runs rampant, and the restrictions placed on women suffocate any spark of independent thought. 

But Ester refuses to stop thinking. She reads texts she is forbidden access to and engages in philosophical correspondence with some of the period’s deepest minds. The significance of Ester’s writings begins to unfold in the novel’s modern timeline, when Helen Watt—an aging historian with Parkinson’s —arrives to examine the fragile documents found hidden behind a wall. Assisted by Aaron Levy, an ambitious graduate student whose bravado masks deeper vulnerabilities, Helen begins the task of deciphering the manuscripts. 

Their discovery that “Aleph” was a woman shocks them both, unraveling assumptions about authorship, authority, and historical silences. As Helen and Aaron continue their work, unexpected echoes begin appearing: fragments of language that seem steeped in theatrical cadence, hints of interactions with London’s intellectual circles, and brushstrokes that suggest Ester may have had contact with the world surrounding Shakespeare’s company. 

Nothing definitively confirms Ester’s link to Shakespeare, but Kadish definitely allows for the possibility. This thread is thoroughly captivating and furthers the intrigue, especially with the suggestion that Ester may have been Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady.”

The novel’s philosophical, yet spiritual, heart is what gives its storytelling such weight. Within the lines is a sense of layered discovery, as every document in Ester’s hand opens another level of meaning, and every revelation about her life forces Helen to confront her own choices, sacrifices, and the things she allowed to fall into silence.

The supporting characters around Ester add dimension to her world as well. Rivka, scarred by the trauma of the Polish pogroms, possesses a quiet intellect and inner clarity that bridges centuries. And towering over Ester’s early life is Rabbi Mendes, a man who, despite being tortured and blinded during the Inquisition, retains a profound compassion.

In both its timelines, the novel interrogates enduring questions about identity, faith, and the cost of survival. The story subtly explores what it is to be Jewish in multiple time periods, questioning what it means to choose survival over martyrdom. These uncertainties follow Ester in the 17th century as she tries to reconcile her loyalty to her community with her hunger for intellectual freedom, and they follow Helen in the 21st century, whose choices echo Ester’s struggles across time.

Both women are brilliant, both have sacrificed love for the demands of the mind, and both learned early that no one would examine their inner truth for them. 

Helen’s warning—“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind”—becomes a kind of key to understanding Ester as well, whose loneliness is shaped not by isolation but by the intensity of her intellect. 

Ester inhabits a world where a woman’s body “was a prison in which her mind must wither,” yet she dreams of being a philosopher, perhaps even a Spinoza, who “might smash some edifice of thought that stood guard over the land,” offering new truths in its place. She comes to believe that “far from being cold, the universe was built of naught but desire, and desire was its sole living god.”

The Weight of Ink moves across time with remarkable skill, weaving 17th Century London, modern England, and even an excursion to 1950s Israel with a fluidity that highlights how questions of faith, freedom, and intellectual ambition repeat across generations. 

The novel is filled with rich detail of Jewish culture and history, as well as the devastation of the plague, the dangers facing Jewish communities, and even the rivalries and politics of 21st century academia.  Even the narrator’s occasional essential commentary adds another layer to the sense that the story is a meditation on storytelling itself.

Rabbi HaCoen Mendes is one of the novel’s most poignant figures. He allows Ester to pursue knowledge that society insists is improper for a woman, even when he recognizes her thoughts veering into blasphemy. His belief that to live without faith—to exist with “no ground beneath one’s feet except the logic of one’s own mind… is to live a death”—stands in contrast to Ester’s belief that the mind’s logic is not a void but a source of energy and longing. Their philosophical tension becomes one of the novel’s most powerful emotional threads.

Ultimately, The Weight of Ink sings to its women. Both Helen and Ester carry what the novel calls a “frightening, alluring,” fever for truth, “the touch of truth,” and for books—those collected voices that exist for them “to explore, question,” and argue against. They struggle with whether understanding can come from inherited texts or whether it must be absorbed from the solitary mind. Their choices are considered bold—even ruthless—in a man, but in a woman, society labels them transgressive.

Kadish persuades readers that a woman like Ester could indeed have existed in the Jewish diaspora of 1660s England. She’s a woman capable of lamenting that love was not her fate, yet declaring with fearless clarity, “A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safer pasture. I cannot fault any such man as takes what ease the world offers him. Nor shall I blame those who disdain the life I choose, and think it misbegotten. Yet this life I have conceived and have sworn to nourish. The choice is mine and I have borne its burdens.”

And perhaps she carried, unknowingly, a thin thread of the theatrical world around her—the echoes of Shakespeare still lingering in the air of post-plague London. Whether she stepped close to him or not, her voice, resurrected through dust and ink, insists that women like her existed in far greater numbers than history ever acknowledged. The Weight of Ink becomes, in the end, a restoration of those voices. As Rachel Kadish says, “How do we know someone didn’t do this?”