Reviews for The Shovel and the Loom

The average rating for The Shovel and the Loom based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-19 00:00:00 Lena Shasky The Shovel and the Loom Chaja and her parents live in Antwerp, Belgium, in the neighbourhood of the Hasidic community. They are liberal Jewish and her parents are holocaust survivors. Chaja starts studying philosophy and rents a room in another neighbourhood. She takes 2 jobs because she wants to be independent. In the mornings she works at a florist and makes funeral wreaths, and in the afternoon she works as a nanny for a Hasidic family with five children. She mainly has to take care for the baby twins and for the youngest, 3-year-old son, Simcha. Chaja grows very found of him, and if it wasn't for Simcha, she would have quit her job because the parents are very distant with her, and the father even hostile. Her father, retired, becomes obsessed with finding two suitcases he buried in Antwerp during the Second World War, when he had to flee to a safer address. Obviously, carrying two big suitcases with him would have attracted too much attention. The original Dutch title of the book refers to those "Two suitcases full" (this sounds grammatically wrong, but that's also the case with the Dutch title). Chaja isn't religious, but she becomes extremely interested in the Jewish identity and especially in the Hasidic habits. Although the story isn't long, I found it really captivating and absorbing. Its theme is very similar to another, more recent Belgian book, Mazzel tov, which is also about a female student who works in an Antwerp Hasidic family to help the children with their studies. But in this book, Chaja is Jewish herself and the story is fictional, while Mazzel tov was autobiographical and the author wasn't Jewish. While reading the book, I could have sworn that the author, Carl Friedman, was Jewish herself and that she lived in Antwerp, because she seemed to know the city and the Jewish neighbourhood very well. But Carl Friedman was born as Carolina Klop and grew up in a Dutch catholic family. Nevertheless she has always made her audience believe that she is Jewish herself. One of her short stories is included in an American compilation of stories by children of Jews that survived the Holocaust! She also traveled to the U.S. to speak at a Conference about the Holocaust. When a friended Dutch Jewish author Gerard Leopold Durlacher died, she even said the Kaddish, which is very strange because this is a privilege for the children of the deceased. Carl Friedman was finally exposed as a 'fake Jew' by a Dutch journalist. This was disgruntling to learn, but nevertheless, I really liked the book, which was also made into an excellent movie in 1998, Left Luggage, with Isabella Rossellini, Jeroen Krabbé and Laura Fraser, who played the character of Chaja. I saw the movie shortly after it came out, and it inspired me to learn more about Hasidism, especially because I have also lived in the Hasidic neighbourhood in Antwerp for three years in the eighties.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-20 00:00:00 George Lil Ik heb genoten van dit boek, het verhaal, het schrijven en het onderwerp.