Your Humble Blogger read the first two books of the Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, so it was pretty much inevitable that when I saw Rashi’s Daughters III: Rachel’s Story on the library shelf, I would pick it up. I said to the librarian that the second one was trashier than the first, and that I hoped the third would be the trashiest yet. And it was, at least where the sex was concerned.
However, that’s not what stuck in my mind. What stuck in my mind was Worms. Worms, Mainz, Speyer, and Peter the Hermit. From the moment I started reading about Rashi, I was waiting for the slaughter. This book is where it happens. The bloody scene itself is taken, including much of the language, from a description I already read (in a book I thought I had reported in this Tohu Bohu, but I can’t find it). Perhaps that’s why, when I was reading that scene, I wasn’t as moved as I wanted to be. It was just there.
A couple of scenes later, Rashi got the news. And then Your Humble Blogger wept. I’m not sure it was the writing of that scene—I am sometimes vulnerable to historical references almost independent of how well it’s presented. I teared up this morning at a goofy school presentation about immigration when the kid got out of the Ellis Island hospital and they let her come to New York with her family. So I’m not saying that Maggie Anton cleverly delayed the emotional impact through the use of original text (text that I suspect isn’t very well-known, although it’s hard for me to tell what people know and what they don’t) to make the later scene more powerful. I think that may have been just me. But that moment is what is staying with me from the book.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.