The Women Before Us is the fourth family history novel by Amy Bess Cohen. Like the three previous books, this one is very loosely based upon Cohen’s ancestors. As a genealogist and family history blogger, Cohen has completed the mountains of research necessary to delve into the lives of these people. But Cohen doesn’t leave it at the usual pedigrees and timelines. Her research leads her to explorations of personality and motivation. She does this in her books and on her blog.
This time, Cohen focuses on the lives of the women of three generations of Jewish women and how their lives are determined by who they marry. This can lead to happiness or it can lead to misery. The book is shaped by the experience of 18-year-old Edna Schwartz who travels from her home in Santa Fe to Philadelphia to visit her aunt in 1922. Against her mother’s hopes, Edna meets her future husband so far from home.
Within Edna’s story we learn the stories of her mother Harriet, Harriet’s German mother Hava, both who left their mothers behind to move with their husbands. We also learn the story of Edna’s (future) mother-in-law Mae who experienced the same displacement. As readers, we witness what these women learn from leaving behind their support systems.
Throughout the book, as suspense builds, there is subtle but consistent foreshadowing that perhaps Edna’s marriage will not be as successful as those of the women who came before her. There is a Jewish tradition to bestow the name of a deceased ancestor on a new baby. Edna and her husband break that tradition, and it seems another clue that things will go wrong. Is it the new age? The mores of a brash young country versus their religion training? That Edna and James are too reckless? That James is spoiled? Ultimately, the true damage to Edna’s marriage is something out of anyone’s control.
The brains of this book is the way it demonstrates how dependent women were on their marriages. These women were not Orthodox Jews, but like all women of their time, they had little chance of a life outside of marriage. And who they married dictated whether their lives would be hard or less so, happy, or even unsafe. The heart of this book is Edna’s mother-in-law Mae. I finished the book, hoping that in the fictional future of the story, one of Edna’s children will name their child after Mae, a strong, kind, maternal, industrious, intelligent woman who does what she must do for her family.
I finished the last page at night and fell asleep soon after. All night I dreamed about the book, the characters inhabiting every dream I had. Edna, Mae, James, Harriet, and the others. It’s hard to believe that these are not Cohen’s actual relatives, but these fictional people were touched with the magic of Cohen’s sympathetic understanding of her own grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
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Amy Bess Cohen’s other books:
