The Rabbi’s Suitcase
In May, 2025 köehlerbooks will release Kehlmann’s novel, The Rabbi’s Suitcase. The fictional work, inspired by real people and true events, is a multi-generational love story that weaves together elements of WWI Palestinian and depression-era American history, family memoirs, and the politically charged passionate love letters Kehlmann found among his mother’s belongings after her death. This is a tale of youthful self-discovery that will interest lovers of historical fiction, romance, the roots of early Jewish statehood, and depression-era emigration to America
Synopsis
In the early 1880s, a battered steamship, overcrowded with Orthodox Jewish travelers, makes a treacherous journey from Lithuania to Jerusalem, the home of their patriarchs. On board, Yosef Siev, a 12-year-old mystic is entranced with wild haired Chana. They will wed and, against a backdrop of Ottoman rule, the privations of WWI, and British Mandatory uprisings, struggle to raise their family.
In 1926, Yosef and Chana’s 17-year-old granddaughter, Zipora, enters into a fiery relationship with Reuven that is forbidden by Jerusalem’s Orthodox Jewish community. Their romance sheds light on the youthful passions and political ambitions of a man destined to become one of the founders of the state of Israel. The liaison extracts a heavy toll. Zipora travels to America hoping to break free of endemic poverty and help pay for Reuven’s education at the Sorbonne. He distinguishes himself in Paris’s Zionist community while she stagnates as a caregiver in a Brooklyn orphanage. Conflicts arise over issues of gender inequality and fidelity, forcing heart-wrenching decisions.
Endorsements
Emotionally compelling, skillfully narrated, impressively original, "The Rabbi's Suitcase" by Robert Kehlmann is an inherently fascinating read from start to finish. One of those novels that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after the book has been finished and set back upon the shelf, "The Rabbi's Suitcase" is especially and unreservedly recommended for community and college/university library Historical Fiction collections.
--Midwest Book Review
“At once an intimate love story and a multigenerational family drama, The Rabbi’s Suitcase is a moving portrayal of the difficulties of forging a new life in a strange land. Robert Kehlmann beautifully weaves elements of his own mother’s letters with strands of the past to create a portrait of a young woman navigating the trials of modernity. The novel is a moving example of how family sources can be used to illuminate the broad sweep of history and how sometimes forgotten stories are waiting to be rescued from the archives.”
—Stefanie Halpern, director of the archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
"This is not a usual family saga. It is the intersection of history, faith and courage. What is more, it is so well written. It is not a typical Jewish novel filled with stereotypes and cliches. It is a moving homage to a real Jewish family, and it is positively cinematic.”
—Arthur Kurzweil, past editor-in-chief of Jewish Book Club and past president of Jewish Book Council
“The Rabbi’s Suitcase is a beautifully written, meticulously researched historical novel based on the author’s family’s remarkable journey from the Old World to the New over a transformative fifty-year period. Kehlmann gives a moving account of his mother, Zipora—a granddaughter and daughter of rabbis and the eldest of eight—as she struggles against the strictures of the religious, patriarchal milieu into which she was born. Her passionate and forbidden love affair, involving an illegal abortion and its harrowing aftermath, serves as a powerful testament to the struggles women have faced, and still face, in finding and asserting their identities.”
—Carole Joffe, professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, U. of California, San Francisco and coauthor of After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe But Not Abortion.
“How curious, how willing are we to delve into the sexual lives of our parents? After finding a trove of love letters among his mother’s possessions after her death, Robert Kehlmann has written a novel reimagining a story about lovers striving to define themselves in which the woman the author has known and loved as mother is portrayed as a passionate partner to a man who isn’t his father. With understanding and lively, intimate gusto, The Rabbi’s Suitcase portrays shifts in relationships within a family over a transitional period from the 1880s to the 1930s.”
—Randall Weingarten, MD, emeritus professor adjunct clinical faculty, Stanford Medicine, Dept. of Psychiatry
Like The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, Robert Kehlmann’s novel digs deep into the familial, societal and religious dynamics of the Jewish immigration experience in pre-partition Palestine. The fact that this novel is based on Kehlmann’s own family history, with its links to America, renders it more poignant and powerful. The yearning of the young to follow their dreams beyond the strictures of their family will resonate with all immigrant families (and aren’t we all ultimately strangers in a strange land?).
--Dean Cycon, award winning author of Finding Home (Hungary, 1945)
