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the Book Review page.In light of the ever-raging immigration debate, Flora's Suitcase could not be published at a better time. The locales, conditions and ethnicities may be different than those of today, yet this is a beautifully personal, instructive immigrant tale that defies time.
Flora is a woman in 1930s Cincinnati. Though she owns a bright spark of independence, she nonetheless marries Dovid after a brief, rather unromantic courtship. Dovid is a man of time and place. His extended family is forced to flee Stalinist Russia, a migration that eventually takes the extended Grossenberg family to Columbia.
It's a sorry lot for Flora. She's stuck in a Third World country with a remote husband, a growing family and a pool of Grossenberg sisters who not only reject her independence, but attempt to subvert her because of it. Flora must fight these conditions and the restrictions on women to find her freedom.
In some ways, Flora's Suitcase is another chapter in the lonely, oppressed women's genre. In the capable hands of author Dalia Rabinovich, however, it becomes much more than that.
Intriguing about Rabinovich is her ability to meld so many different styles and genres seamlessly. Flora's Suitcase is part immigrant tale, part Jewish saga, part chick story and part Third World exploration. Rabinovich throws in a dose of magical realism to boot, then wraps it all in the voice of Jewish classics. What remains is a spartan, detached narrative that packs emotional punch. This style allows the story to roam freely. Whether Flora is being mistaken by peasants for a saint, or being asked by Dovid to give their daughter to a childless relative, Rabinovich never falls prey to melodrama, nor do such spectacular events seem implausible.
This is a skilled new writer very much worth following.
Reviewed by Maria Sjoquist in November, 1999.