The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories
by Tova Reich
Seven Stories Press, £10.99

Tova Reich turned 80 last year. Born during the Second World War, she is part of the generation of leading Jewish-American feminist writers that included Erica Jong and Nora Ephron.

She has published half a dozen novels and has just brought out her first book of short stories, The House of Love and Prayer. Written over more than 40 years, it is hard to imagine a more Jewish selection.

One of the most interesting themes in contemporary culture is the desire of Jewish women to break away from the world of Orthodoxy.

The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories

Cover of The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories (Photo: Handout)

There’s Naomi Alderman’s novel Disobedience (turned into a film starring Rachel Weisz) and the recent Netflix drama series Unorthodox. Reich gives this a twist in some of her stories when young women become the victims of Jewish rabbis and are unable to break away.

These rabbis are unpleasant, indifferent or worse to the young women in their charge.

In the first story a young teenage girl disappears on a school outing in the woods.

Rabbi Berman, the school principal, couldn’t care less. According to Berman, Feigie Singer, the daughter of a fruit man, was not part of the elite, just a thin little girl who didn’t matter. Reb Salzman, in the second story, Forbidden City, is even worse.

He raises one young girl “to serve as his pilegesh [concubine] when she came of age so that he would no longer have to bother Frumie [his wife] with his needs”. It was, he thought, “a practical solution, which, in the end, did not really hurt anyone”.

A second recurring theme, even more powerful, is the subject of women’s bodies, often in contrast with the world of religious faith and purity. The language is strong, often disturbing.

Reich writes of “the meat of belly and buttocks”, “the pits of knotted scarring flesh where the breasts had been, or the long pale gash in the waxy flesh of the lower belly, in the region of the womb”.

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Powerful: Tova Reich (Photo: Handout)

Perhaps the most moving story of all is of the friendship between two women, Luba and Lola, who have joined the neighbourhood women’s chevra kadisha bereavement committee, and meet regularly to prepare dead bodies for burial. Luba is a mountain of a woman, big and strong.

It was her strength, she says, that saved her in the camps. Lola, desperately lonely, cannot compete with Luba’s stories. She “was Holocaust challenged”.

The Holocaust runs through many of these stories, often mentioned in passing, sometimes just in a powerful passage. In The Plot, a boy has just returned from a pilgrimage to Poland.

“From the backpack he drew out a plastic bag filled with pieces of bone he had collected from a garbage dump at one of the death camps… The rabbi agreed to bury the bones in the cemetery.”

We are never told whether he did. The story just moves on. In The Page Turner, a story about a concert pianist, the Jewish audience file into the concert hall, “many from the same shtetls and death camps, as they tended to reserve their seats in blocs based on where they came from in the old country, in the same way that they reserved their plots in cemeteries”.

These are dark stories, powerfully and simply told. Tova Reich should be better known for her writing about Orthodox Jews with a feminist twist. Perhaps this book will help her break through to a new British audience.