Queen Esther

By John Irving
Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30

In The Cider House Rules, John Irving opens with a urological concern.

The nurses in the boys’ division of the St. Cloud Orphanage spend their new arrivals’ early days “checking that their little penises were healing from their obligatory circumcisions.”

Decades later, in Queen Esther, a muddled sequel of sorts, about a New England family and their ill-at-ease scion’s ambivalent Jewish identity, Irving considers the procedure as a sign of the covenant.

Esther Nacht, an orphan from that same institution — self-described as “a Viennese-born Jew who grew up in an orphanage in Maine, her mother murdered by anti-semites in Portland!” — becomes uniquely invested in what to do with the foreskin of her soon-to-be-born son.

It’s not her decision alone to make. Esther is only the surrogate mother, carrying the boy for Honor Winslow, the New Hampshire girl whose parents took Esther from the orphanage in the 1920s to be her au pair. Honor and Esther agree on one matter: The boy, Jimmy — who will be circumcised but will not have a bris — won’t be brought up Jewish, “for his own sake.”

Esther, for her part, has no choice. Her mother insisted she know about her Jewishness, and by dint of her murder at the hands of unclearly-motivated antisemites, unwittingly entrusted that education to the clueless Dr. Larch and his staff at St. Cloud. Irving, whose preoccupation with circumcision may betray him as a closet intactivist, seems to have a narrow and at times troubling idea of what it means to live Jewishly.

While Irving’s body of work is decidedly goyische, Jews have appeared sporadically. A mother in A Prayer for Owen Meany cries antisemitism over the title character’s rudeness (he didn’t know she was Jewish).  Billy Abbott, in 2012’s In One Person, sides with Shylock while reading Merchant of Venice.

Irving makes no bones about being on the side of the oppressed — even vengeful — Jew. As he said in a 2024 interview with The Times of Israel, “I’m not Jewish, but I’ve always been pro-Israel, and I’ve always been pro-Jewish.” This novel, if coming from a left flank, with a stridently pro-choice and anti-religion cast of characters, may be his version of Project Esther.

The author’s identification is embodied here by Esther’s biological son Jimmy Winslow. Through his adoptive family he’s a faculty brat at Penacook Academy in New Hampshire, Irving’s latest stand-in for Phillips Exeter, where his stepfather was a teacher, and where he nursed a certain alienation.

“I always felt that I didn’t belong there; I always felt like a foreigner,” Irving told The Times, and so he connected with Jewish wrestling teammates. Throughout the book Jimmy is stuck with an unshakable “belief in his intrinsic foreignness.” (He later becomes an author who writes a novel called The Doctor’s Rules, about the orphanage at St. Cloud, which seems rather familiar.)

That Irving is not Jewish isn’t a problem, given Jimmy isn’t really either, beyond the fact of his biological parents, the tall, elusive Esther and a petite wrestler (always with the wrestling, and the nebulous paternity) named Moshe Kleinberg — aka “Moses Little Mountain.” Like Irving, he’s an “ally,” sticking up for a teammate named Jonah Feldstein (incidentally the given name of Superbad star Jonah Hill) roughed up by antisemitic toughs named Marcel and Marceau (ironically the stage name of a Jewish mime).

For the purposes of this plot, which mostly follows Jimmy, Jewishness is but a mark of difference, and a distinction without much of one. Except for fear.

“It’s too late for you to be Jewish — you didn’t grow up afraid,” Esther tells Jimmy, in one of her laconic letters.

Esther, with no real Jewish education, nonetheless had a Jewish calling, first going to Vienna in the lead-up to World War II, where she served as a courier to exiled Austrian Jews in Czechoslovakia. She later makes aliyah (Irving helpfully translates this and other Hebrew terms to English) and appears to work for the Haganah and later Mossad in some unknown capacity. Esther’s Jewish journey is one her adoptive family doesn’t feel comfortable tackling, and Irving doesn’t either, so we mostly hear the details in passing via the mailbox.

The book is both wildly preoccupied by Jewishness and antisemitism and completely uncomfortable with illustrating how either functions beyond some rote, inelegantly conveyed history lessons on Mandatory Palestine. It even recuses itself by disappearing Esther as she pursues her goal to be the best Jew possible, which makes you wonder why any of the Jewish meshugas is even there in the first place.

When, in the final stretch, the plot places an adult Jimmy in Jerusalem amid the Lebanese Civil War two characters, who seem sympathetic at first, collapse his empathy toward Palestinians by affirming the ugliest slander imaginable: The Arab population wants to wipe out all Jews, and indoctrinate their children to think the same.

“This is what Esther was protecting him from,”  Jimmy concludes, “the eternal conflict, the everlasting hatred.”

To Irving, the Jewish condition is being hated, and not much else. It’s a relief when he drops this theme, for about half the novel, to recount a zany sex plot in Vienna (it always waits for Irving’s characters) where Jimmy befriends a German Shepherd named “Hard Rain” (for the Dylan song), and plots to “knock up” the lesbian partner of his roommate to dodge the draft in Vietnam.

Somewhere inside here is a reflection of the predicament of the biblical Queen Esther, whose tale provides an epigraph (“For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish”).

Like Jimmy, Esther had a Jewishness she had to suppress in order to function as a secret advocate for her people. Only Jimmy is told to ignore his heritage — not just the Jewish parts, but the Mayflower pedigree of his adoptive family. That this may come as a loss is dutifully acknowledged, but a bit beside the point.

With regard to Esther herself, Irving’s read of the Megillah is misguided, opting to see her namesake as “wreaking vengeance on Haman.” The Winslows call her an “Old Testament girl,” and Irving seems to think most of that book boils down to “kill-or-be-killed” talion law.

Many critiques I can level at the novel are already voiced within it.

At various points the book points to Esther’s “vagueness” saying it’s as if she “lived in the background, like peripheral characters in a novel” Later Jimmy states there is “something more mythical than actual about Esther. Like a literary character,” with the mysterious loss of her arm seeming more “symbolic than real.” Pretty much. Pointing this out doesn’t make up for her deficiencies as a character. The fact that her name means “hidden” is hardly an excuse for obscuring nearly everything about her.

Where the Book of Esther is lean, cogent and contains nothing extraneous, Queen Esther is flabby and unfocused. Jimmy’s grandfather, Thomas, an English teacher with a love for Victorian fiction, insists “real life isn’t plotted like a novel.” This novel isn’t either.

But Thomas, a Boston Brahmin just out of place in smalltown New Hampshire, also offers some sage words when it comes to Esther. Whenever the family’s concerned for her undefined escapades in Europe or the new State of Israel, he reminds them “Jewish business is her business, not ours.”

If only Irving was canny enough to keep out of it too.

The post John Irving always felt like an outsider — is that all he thinks there is to Jewishness? appeared first on The Forward.

More than 80 years after she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of the only military operation in World War II that attempted to rescue Jews, the Jewish poet and kibbutznik Hannah Senesh is having her moment.

The play “Hannah Senesh” is running through Nov. 9 at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York — an excellent one-woman show, starring Jennifer Apple,  that draws directly from Senesh’s diary and poems. 

A new book by Douglas Century, “Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II,” is a work of nonfiction written with the pacing and tension of a thriller. 

Early next year, the noted Israeli journalist Matti Friedman will tell the story of Hannah’s team of parachutists in “Out of The Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.”

And this week the New York Times gave Senesh the obituary treatment she had been denied in 1944, as part of its “Overlooked No More” project.

Why, in 2025, is the culture turning its attention to the story of this young poet, soldier and martyr? What does her life mean, especially, to Jews?

Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921 to an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Her father, Béla Szenes, was a well-known playwright and journalist who died when she was a child, and her mother, Katharine, raised her and her brother alone. Their home was cultured and secular. 

As a schoolgirl, Hannah excelled in writing and was drawn to literature, but by her teenage years, antisemitism had begun to close in on Hungarian Jews. Rather than retreat, she grew more conscious of her Jewish identity and of the new Zionist movement that sought to combine Jewish pride with action.

In 1939, as the clouds of war gathered, Senesh left Budapest for Palestine. She studied at the Nahalal agricultural school for girls and later joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea, embracing the pioneer life. In the kibbutz she found a community rooted in the land and faith in the future of the Jewish people. There she also honed her poetic voice, writing verses that would later become part of Jewish collective memory.

I, along with countless young people, grew up singing her most famous poem in Jewish summer camps. That is “Eli, Eli” — “My God, my God, may these things never end: the sand and the sea, the rustle of the waters, the lightning of the heavens, the prayer of man.” The poem’s original title is “Walking to Caesarea,” which is where Hannah wrote it. Caesearea, the Roman capital of ancient Palestine, was where the sages suffered martyrdom. The reference to the site suggests Hannah could sense the possibility of her own martyrdom. 

So does “Blessed Is the Match,” another of her best-known poems: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame, blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.” 

As the Holocaust unfolded, Senesh could not remain on the sidelines. She volunteered for a special British unit to train Jewish parachutists who would drop behind enemy lines to aid Allied forces and assist persecuted Jews. 

Hannah Senesh wears the uniform of the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, which she joined in 1943. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive)

In 1944, she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of an Allied mission to reach occupied Hungary. Her goal was to make contact with the underground and help rescue Jews who were being deported to Auschwitz. After months of operating with Yugoslav partisans, she attempted to cross the Hungarian border but was captured by fascist forces. Tortured, interrogated and offered the chance to save her life by revealing secret details of her mission, she refused. When asked if she was British, she reportedly declared instead, “I am a Jew.” 

Senesh was imprisoned in Budapest, tried for treason and executed by firing squad on Nov. 7, 1944. She was only 23. Her writings — diaries, poems, and letters — were preserved by her mother and later published, ensuring that her voice lived on. Nearly every Israeli household has a copy of her writings. 

Like Anne Frank, Hannah left behind a diary chronicling her idealism and inner life. But where Anne Frank’s writings reflect a confined adolescence, albeit with a free-floating spirit, Hannah Senesh’s life was defined by agency and action. 

She was not only a poet and diarist; she was a soldier who took up arms against the Nazi war machine. Her vision of heroism fused cultural Zionism with physical courage — a model of Jewish strength that is both intellectual and militant. She was, in many ways, a figure closer to Theodor Herzl than to Anne Frank: a Hungarian Jew whose secular upbringing gave way to a conscious and proud Jewish identity, and whose life was devoted to the realization of that identity in the land of Israel.

Like me, Douglas Century grew up learning Hannah’s story. In my conversation with him, he told me that “her martyrdom amazed and terrified” him. He came to know David Senesh, Hannah’s nephew, who is a therapist specializing in trauma (and who this month spoke to the Times of Israel about how his aunt’s story influenced his life and his work with former hostages and other traumatized Israelis). David had been a prisoner of war in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and spent months undergoing torture. David’s father, George, had been in a POW camp in Vichy France, and his grandmother, Catherine, had been a prisoner of the Gestapo

As David wryly told Century: “I sometimes think it’s our destiny – or something in the Senesh family DNA.” 

These converging story lines of Jewish agency and sacrifice suggest why Hannah’s story may be right for these fraught times, marked by antisemitism, anti-Zionism and moral confusion.

The Folksbiene production of Hannah Senesh and the books by Century and Friedman arrive at a time when Jews feel pressure to minimize or conceal their identity. The play’s climactic moment — when Senesh asserts her Jewishness to her captors — feels like a direct message to today’s audience: a call not to erase or apologize for who we are. It is both a historical reenactment and a moral demand. 

To that end, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has launched a special fundraising initiative to make tickets for “Hannah Senesh” available free of charge for students — both Jewish and non-Jewish. With incidents of antisemitism, intolerance and hatred taking place at an alarming clip in the city, NYTF is committed to providing up to 1,000 free student tickets. 

There is also a deep cultural hunger for stories of heroism and moral clarity. Senesh’s story even appears in the late Sen. John McCain’s memoir, “Why Courage Matters”: “I don’t think Hannah wanted to die for the sake of having her memory exalted in history or to prove herself equal to a romantic image she conceived for herself,” writes McCain. “Her purpose wasn’t to die. She died for her life’s purpose.” 

Senesh’s story is also a rebuke to  the way too many Jews and others remember the Holocaust. For decades, much of Holocaust representation has focused on Jewish victimhood and suffering. Senesh represents something different: defiance, action and dignity. Her story restores a narrative of Jewish power and resistance, embodied not by generals or politicians but by a 23-year-old woman who refused to compromise her Jewish identity. In an age when many feel ambivalent about that identity — when assimilation, fear, or politicized hostility challenge Jewish expression — her unwavering sense of purpose feels radical and necessary. 

At a time when “Zionist” and its hateful cousin “Zio” are epithets, more often spat than spoken, the musical, in particular, reclaims that identity as a badge of courage. Moreover, it locates a Zionist identity where it belongs — as a symbol of idealism and resilience. In the show, Hannah makes it clear: Her Zionism echoes that of the philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that both Jews and Arabs could and would share the land. 

Every time I lead services from the Reform prayer book, “Mishkan T’filah,” and I come to the readings before the Mourner’s Kaddish, I encounter Hannah’s poem, “Yesh Kochavim”: “There are stars up above, so far away we only see their light long, long after the star itself is gone.” That is Hannah Senesh — a star that fell to earth long before its time, but whose light still illuminates the world.  

This is Hannah Senesh’s moment. It comes at a time that calls for models of Jewish strength, compassion and integrity. The play and Century’s book answer that call — not with nostalgia but with renewal. They remind us that, even when surrounded by darkness, the match still burns, and the stars still shine.

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Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to uncover the identities of all of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, crossing the 5-million name threshold with the help of AI.

That leaves 1 million names still unknown from the tally of 6 million murdered Jews that is synonymous with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

Two years ago, Yad Vashem inaugurated a 26.5 foot-long “Book of Names,” which included the names of 4,800,000 victims of the Shoah, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Since then, researchers deployed AI technology and machine learning to analyze hundreds of millions of archival documents that were previously too extensive to research manually, according to Yad Vashem. In addition to covering large amounts of material quickly, the algorithms were taught to look out for variations of victims’ names, leading to the new identification of hundreds of thousands of victims.

Yad Vashem estimates an additional 250,000 names could still be recovered using the technology.

“Reaching 5 million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, in a statement. “Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”

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