Karen Hesse

In letters to her cousin, a young Jewish girl chronicles her family's flight from Russia in 1919 and her own experiences when she must be left in Belgium for a while when the others immigrate to America.

Letters from Rifka

Missy Zuber 

Diary of a young Russian Jewish girl and her struggles while immigrating to the United States in the 1910s. The entries are written in the borders and blank areas of a book of poetry.

First read when I was in sixth or seventh grade.

Jeni Enjaian

After how much I loved Phoenix Rising by the same author, I found myself disappointed with this book. Hesse did not write a bad book. This was just not a book for me. I knew that from the start when I discovered that Hesse wrote the book using an epistolary format. I think that this format can work but it really rubs me the wrong way when the letters do not take actual letter form. By that I mean, the letters become a story. They take on the format of a regular narrative with the paragraph structure and dialogue and thought narration. People do not write letters like this. People do not write diaries like this. I read a lot of the "Diary of America" books which take this format and while I enjoyed them, I also had the same difficulty with it.
In the end, I just did not connect with Rifka which made this a difficult book to love. However, Hesse does portray a true story, a story based on the life of one of her family members, which kept the events of the narrative grounded in reality and redeemed the choice of an epistolary format.

Letters from Rifka

Reviews