Recently picked up by Netflix and turned into a show of the same name, the first ten episodes will be released on May 20, Chronicling four generations of women in the Ermosa family, this international bestseller is set in Jerusalem, where it takes readers from the end of the 19th century to just after the War of Independence in At the heart of the novel is a curse: The women in the Ermosa family are cursed to fall in love with and marry men who do not love them back. The vast majority of the story is chronological, though the book opens with the death of Luna, the eponymous beauty queen.
These relationships between the women are the core of the book, and it is a unique exploration of the needs, desires and unfulfilled hopes of Jewish women throughout history. Her carefully crafted female characters grapple with life, love, and how to respond to the choices made by the men in their lives with a realism and poignancy that more than does justice to the dramatic era in which it is set.
Here, women ask one another questions that Jewish women have asked themselves for thousands of years, but set in a modern time of conflict and choice, and the answers feel different. The curse of the Ermosa women originated, perhaps fittingly enough, with a man. He is so entranced he cannot even study Torah and wanders the city at night hoping to find her again. As a Sephardic son, he knows his parents would never approve of him marrying an Ashkenazi girl, and so eventually he gives up his search, and allows himself to be married to a fellow Sephardi woman, Mercada.
The marriage is prosperous but loveless, despite the joy brought to Raphael and Mercada by their son Gabriel. One day, Gabriel sees the same Ashkenazi woman and her daughter while working at the Ermosa family stall at the local market, and is instantly taken with the daughter, Rochel. Unlike his father, he pursues and attempts to marry Rochel, leading to a scandal throughout Jerusalem. When Raphael dies suddenly, Mercada sees this as the spiritual world taking revenge on her family for her son falling in love with an Ashkenazi woman and decides to set everything right by exacting her own revenge and marrying Gabriel off to a woman he has never seen before, Rosa.
Together, Gabriel and Rosa have three daughters. The second born, Rachelika, joins the Haganah in high school, the underground Zionist paramilitary group intent on driving the British out of Palestine.
