** Winner of the 2020 Jewish Fiction Award ** A novel of wisdom and uncertainty of love in its
greater and lesser forms and of the struggle between how it should be and how it is. It is
impossible not to be moved. -Amy Bloom author of White Houses This book brings the reader into
the heart of a close-knit Jewish family and their joys loves and sorrows . . . A marvelous
book by a masterful writer. -Audrey Niffenegger author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time
Traveler's Wife Through one woman's life at a moment of surprising change the award-winning
author Goldie Goldbloom tells a deeply affecting morally insightful story and offers a rare
look inside Brooklyn's Chasidic community On Division Avenue just a block or two up from the
East River in Williamsburg Brooklyn Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten
children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws postwar immigrants from
Romania live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second.
She and Yidel a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year live on
the third. Wed when Surie was sixteen they have a happy marriage and a full life and at the
ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two they are looking forward to some quiet time together. Into
this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It
is a shock. And at her age at this stage it is an aberration a shift in the proper order of
things and a public display of private life. She feels exposed ashamed. She is unable to
share the news even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life she has a
secret-a secret that slowly separates her from the community. Goldie Goldbloom's On Division is
an excavation of one woman's life a story of awakening at middle age and a thoughtful
examination of the dynamics of self and collective identity. It is a steady-eyed look inside
insular communities that also celebrates their comforts. It is a rare portrait of a long happy
marriage. And it is an unforgettable new novel from a writer whose imagination is matched only
by the depth of her humanity.
