When young widow and Jewish convert Batsheva Jacobs and her five-year-old daughter Ayala move into the Memphis, Tennessee, neighborhood where her husband grew up, their arrival sends shock waves through the small and tightly knit Orthodox community. The women who narrate the novel, in one voice, fear that Batsheva's brand of Orthodox Judaism--spirited and innovative--and the close relationship she soon develops with a group of high-school girls will corrupt their children and leave them dissatisfied with the dictates of their religion. Events come to a head when a teenage girl runs away and the rabbi's son announces that he is having strong doubts about his commitment to an Orthodox life. Mirvis's first novel is filled with affectionately described scenes of Jewish life, including shabbos dinners and holiday celebrations; but the dilemma over how much change a religion can absorb before it loses its heart and soul--and its children--is one that applies to any creed. Readers who enjoyed Pearl Abraham's The Romance Reader (1995) and Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls (1998) will want to read this. Nancy Pearl
From Kirkus Reviews
A debut that details, with wisdom and grace, the inevitable tensions between the comfort of community and the need for individual freedom, as a young widow and convert moves into a close-knit Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and becomes an unwitting catalyst for change. The Orthodox families of Memphis, Tennessee, are as proud of their century-old southern roots as they are of their Jewish heritage. They all live in the same neighborhood, attend the same synagogue, and educate their children at the same schools. Members of the older generation like Mrs. Levy, the community's matriarch as well as its eyes and ears, are intent on preserving the old rules. But younger matrons like Naomi Eisenberg yearn for more freedom, and the teenagers, especially Shira Feldman, are feeling rebellious. The story of the year that follows Batsheva's arrival with five-year-old daughter Ayala is related by the surprisingly effective ``we'' of the Ladies Auxiliary. An artist who found the spiritual home she'd been seeking in Judaism, Batsheva comes to Memphis because her late husband Benjamin had lived there and she wants Ayala to have the same warm and secure childhood he had. Beguiled by Batsheva's enthusiasm and fresh response to rituals and holidays that for them are now sterile and onerous routines, the Ladies are at first friendly and welcoming. That changes, however, when Batsheva starts teaching art to the high-school girls and becomes their mentor and confidant. The women are also suspicious of her friendship with the rabbi's son, Yosef, whos taking a year off from his rabbinical studies. When Shira Feldman runs away with her gentile boyfriend and Yosef decides not to become a rabbi, the Ladies blame Batsheva and suggest she leave. Wise Mimi, the Rabbi's wife, helps them finally accept both Batsheva and the changes the community needs if it is to survive. An impressive debut, up there on that high middle ground the Victorians made their own. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"The Ladies' Auxiliary" is a truly compelling look into a community where the divine is always bumping up against the human. -- Elizabeth Strout, author of "Amy and Isabelle"
The Ladies' Auxiliary, with its brilliantly original collective narrative voice, sheds entirely new light on the nature of community. Insightful and compassionate, it is rich in detail and full of evocative power. -- Mary Gordon
A dash of "The Crucible," a pinch of "The Golem", a sharp eye, a keen ear an engaging sense of humor, and an incomparable narrative voice render "The Ladies' Auxiliary" a small miracle. Tova Mirvis has transported the Salem witch hunt from Puritan New England to a contemporary Orthodox Jewish Community in Memphis, Tennessee, and the result is a highly original, wise and wonderful novel. -- Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of "History on a Personal Note"
In this appealing if uneven novel--part cautionary tale, part comedy of manners--the home-front threat comes in the form of a young widow... -- The New York Times Book Review, Roy Hoffman
Tova Mirvis grants us the illicit pleasure of eavesdropping on a closed world. A wise, generous debut. -- Kiran Desai, author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Tova Mirvis's debut novel marks the entrance of an important new voice in fiction. By being so uncompromisingly true to the particulars of the small world of Jewish Orthodoxy in Memphis, Tennessee, she manages to produce a tale of the widest universal scope. At once wickedly satiric and lovingly sympathetic, it is an insider's look at the pressures brought to bear on insularity by the appearance of an outsider. -- Rebecca Goldstein, author of "Mazel" and "The Mind-Body Problem"
From the Author
The idea for The Ladies Auxiliary first came to me over coffee with a friend in New York. My friend had recently converted to Judaism. She struck me as someone who was different, who followed her own mind without worrying about what other people thought of her. I was telling her about the close-knit world of the Memphis Orthodox Jewish community where I grew up, and at one point she jokingly asked me, "What if I moved to Memphis?" I looked at her and thought, "My God, what if you did?" My friend's comment inspired me to think about the way an outsider can challenge a world like the one I had grown up in. In this community everyone knows everyone else, and most people are related in some way. People feel rooted in the city; it is a community that goes back several generations. I am a fifth generation Memphian on one side, and most of my family still lives there. My great grandfather started the Jewish newspaper; my grandparents helped found the Jewish day school there. I grew up feeling thatI had a place, that I was connected to a community and a tradition.
But I also felt that there was little room to be different. There was a strong pressure to conform to a narrow definition of how you were supposed to be, and it was considered wrong to question anything about the community. For me, this was often suffocating, and ultimately I chose to live in a place that was more open.
Writing this novel was a way to explore my own relationship to this community. Adopting the point of view of the women of the Ladies Auxiliary, I began to understand their impulse to preserve a way of life that sometimes felt as if it was slipping away. I missed the sense of kinship that I grew up with. I missed being rooted in a place and having deep connections to a city and the people who live there. But I also felt the difficulty of trying to live in such a close-knit world. I discovered that writing about the community where I grew up separated me more from it. It was as if I had broken a pact not to reveal the inner workings of this world and could never be inside of it again. But for me, part of being a writer means looking honestly at my own world and asking questions about it.
About the Author
Tova Mirvis is the author of three novels, Visible City, The Outside World, and The Ladies Auxiliary which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Poets and Writers, and Good Housekeeping, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She lives outside of Boston with her three children.
