I had just finished watching Shtisel on Netflix and wanted more of the community and the traditions when I started reading this novel.
We meet Surie who is part of the Williamsburg Jewish community, about to become a great-grandmother. As the novel opens, we find Surie waiting for the bus home having just confirmed that she is pregnant with twins.
We hear all of Surie’s thoughts: how and when is she going to tell her husband? What is she going to do? I found myself on the edge of my seat for almost the entire book; This story welcomes you into a hidden world; forces you to feel all the emotions and contradictions of living a life and leaves you embracing all the joys and deep sorrows of a life well lived. ( )

I had just finished watching Shtisel on Netflix and wanted more of the community and the traditions when I started reading this novel.
We meet Surie who is part of the Williamsburg Jewish community, about to become a great-grandmother. As the novel opens, we find Surie waiting for the bus home having just confirmed that she is pregnant with twins.
We hear all of Surie’s thoughts: how and when is she going to tell her husband? What is she going to do? I found myself on the edge of my seat for almost the entire book; This story welcomes you into a hidden world; forces you to feel all the emotions and contradictions of living a life and leaves you embracing all the joys and deep sorrows of a life well lived. ( )

Here's the flip side of Unorthodox: the woman who stays. Mother of ten, grandmother of thirty two, almost a great-grandmother. Married at 16, deeply settled into and revered in her Chassidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn - and Surie Eckstein is pregnant again, with twins, at age 57. Medical or religious miracle and embarrassing and disastrous for the status of her family, Surie cannot bring herself to tell her loving husband Yidel, a Torah scribe. She chooses her non-Jewish midwife as her confidante and stretches the boundaries of life outside her home, learns English and anatomy, and risks losing everything. Surie's melange of courage and foolishness make this an endearing portrait of a woman who daringly reaches beyond her cocoon. The author is divorced, has eight children of her own and is a member of the Chassidic community of Chicago. ( )

What a book. Sort of sad and depressing. Was aware of what was going to happen in this life of a Chassidic woman who was pregnant with twins but refused to tell her family, especially her husband. How can a woman go 9 months without doing so and noone noticing? Her daughter thought she was kidding when she tried to tell her daughter and she thought she was just fat w/extra layers.

It was a frustrating and hard book to read in my opinion and how could she keep such a secret and tell the mid-wife at the hospital she went for pre-natal care? ( )

I absolutely loved Goldie Goldbloom's other novel, THE PAPERBARK SHOE, a real literary potboiler, with its abandoned albino artistic heroine, set in the unforgiving Outback of Australia during WWII. It was a book of considerable scope with a number of unexpected twists and turns, filled with cruelty, despair, quirky characters and even some kinky sex. It was - IS - a real one-of-a-kind sort of book. And now, several years later, we have this book, ON DIVISION, and lemme tell ya, it is NOTHING like her first book. But that doesn't matter. I absolutely loved this one too.

ON DIVISION takes its title from the main street running through Williamsburg, the Jewish section of Brooklyn, the book's setting. The time is the present, and the book's heroine, Surie Eckstein, is a devoutly Chassidic Jew, mother of ten, grandmother many times over, and wife of Yidel, a much sought after and respected scribe who creates traditional Torahs, employing careful calligraphy on animal skins. At fifty-seven, Surie has a secret. She is pregnant, with twins. Her youngest child is now thirteen. Since then she has survived cancer and a double mastectomy. She feels, at first, mostly shame, and is afraid to tell her husband - indeed, she is afraid to tell anyone. She forms an alliance with Val, the single, childless midwife who has delivered all of her children. Val urges Surie to tell Yidel, but Surie resists telling, putting it off repeatedly. In the meantime, she becomes Val's helper in the Manhattan clinic just across the bridge, and even begins to study midwifery. Books and study, and even any talk of sex or pregnancy, we learn, are strictly forbidden, but Surie continues to progress and learn about all of it. She becomes a valuable asset as a Yiddish interpreter for all the pregnant Jewish mothers who come to the clinic.

Unlike Goldbloom's previous book, Surie's story is intensely local and very personal. We get a crash course in the life of Chassidic Jewish women, a very cloistered, "apart" sort of life, where the men grow beards and the sidelocks, while the women must shave their heads and wear wigs and scarves, or cloth turbans. They have their own stores and temples and adhere strictly to the teachings of the Torah. Surie's other secret sorrow is her son, Lipa, gay and flamboyant, who was banished not just by their community, but even by his father. Because the Chassidic community has both its good and bad sides. On the good side, children are all-important. Here's how Surie herself put it, remembering the birth of her tenth child -

"Why should I scream, why should I moan, when I am doing the exact thing I was made for? When I am fulfilling my part in creation? Thank God I know my place in the world. The Torah speaks about many things, but always, always it talks about the children that come forth, the children that one is to sacrifice for. Every part of my life is turned towards children, the having of children, the raising of children."

But the community is unforgiving and intolerant of those who are "different," and so Lipa, with his flagrantly gay ways, was forced out. He was Surie's favorite (though she knows 'favorites' are also forbidden), and, though she is supposed to act as though he never existed, she cannot get Lipa out of her heart and mind, reasoning -

"... what, after all, was so terrible about loving a man instead of a woman? Did the Torah forbid loving? She did not know, did not want to know, what Lipa had done behind closed doors. But then, she did not know what her friends, women she had known for fifty years, did behind closed doors either. None of them spoke about such things. How she wished the veil of secrecy had remained drawn for Lipa too."

In a conversation she has with Val, Surie blurts out her secret, along with her real feelings -

"I had a child who was both gay and not religious, and though he pushed me hard, though everything he did felt like he took a razor to my flesh, I could not stop loving him. And if I had the chance again, I would bring him home and put him to sleep in the best bed, and I would tell him to bring home his boyfriend and I would tell all of my children and my grandchildren to smile at him and to love him and never to stop. And that is because a parent's love does not end. Should not end."

Yes. But the Chassidic community was not that forgiving, could be cruel even, and Surie knows this. She sees this again in the case of a thirteen year-old girl who comes to the clinic, impregnated by an "unlicensed" therapist she had been sent to, a community elder in his sixties. And when she tries to report the man, she is further disappointed, as she is by Yidel, who disapproves of her studying to be a midwife. She is also extremely disappointed in his inability to see that she herself is pregnant again.

The focus in this book is a very narrow one, centered as it is in this small, insular religious community of Brooklyn. I do not want to give anything else away, but trust me, there is unbelievable tension - and suspense - in Surie's very personal story. I was quickly caught up in it. And I suspect anyone who appreciates good writing and, especially, good characters, will love this book as much as I did. My very highest recommendation. Bravo, Ms Goldbloom!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )