Horodno Burning
In the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, Esther Leving, a brilliant young bibliophile, chafes at male dominance, religious dogma, and antisemitism. Bernard Garfinkle, a religious Jew and the son of a vodka distiller, hides a shameful secret-in a culture that worships books, he can't read. Despite their differences, they fall in love. Esther teaches Bernard to read and he in turn builds her a bookshop. They start a family, but when ferocious pogroms target Russian Jews, they must confront violent oppression.
Exploring the turbulent history which led to the great migration, when one-and-a-half million Jews emigrated to America between 1881 and 1914, Horodno Burning is a love letter to literature, freedom, and Jewish survival.
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"Michael Freed-Thall's Horondo Burning is a beautifully-textured, epic historical novel with an ending that will simultaneously break your heart and inspire you to live life to the fullest. With courageous, noble, and big-hearted characters at its center, Horondo Burning takes readers on a journey through turbulent and dramatic times and into a rich and stirring account of Jewish history. Readers of historical fiction who look for strong female characters at the spine will be enraptured by this exquisite debut."
-Stephanie Storey, bestselling author of Oil and Marble and Raphael, Painter in Rome
"Thoughtful, powerful, and tender, Horodno Burning brings to life the conflicts and contradictions of family life and political activism in the Pale of Settlement, beginning with the story of a religious boy who cannot read and a girl who loves books and wants equality for women. Living with the constant threat of violence in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire, Bernard and Esther search for ways to resist the prejudice and hatred and build a family. Michael Freed-Thall offers a moving story about human persistence and hope despite brutality, and about the power of storytelling to fight injustice. Horodno Burning is both timeless and timely."
-Ellen Meeropol, author of Her Sister's Tattoo
"What a tremendous book! The prose is brilliant and tender in this absorbing debut novel. The struggles of Estes and Bernard as wife and husband and as young parents during a time of massive cultural change is universal in its themes. Yet Horodno Burning is an invitation into a particular place and time, placing the reader in the heart of a community on the cusp of a great migration. Epic in scope, intimate in detail, Horodno Burning is historical fiction at its finest. I was so very moved and astonished by this story."
-Julie Christine Johnson, author of The Crows of Beara and In Another Life
