A Farmhouse, a Family, Their Secrets
To Die in Secret by Haviva Ner-David (Bedazzled Ink Publishing, $19.95), is a novel about a newly widowed woman’s journey from mourning to healing. The book opens with 60-year-old Nomi on a plane for the first time in 40 years, heading to the U.S., “not taking up much room in the world, perhaps no room at all, ephemeral and barely existing… suspended between here and there.”
Ner-David, like Nomi, is a kibbutz-dweller who grew up in the U.S. She has written three memoirs, one children’s book, and a debut novel, Hope Valley. To Die in Secret, her second novel, is enhanced by her experiences as a kibbutznik, “dreamworker,” rabbi, mikveh specialist, peace activist, and “interfaith spiritual companion.”
Before the novel begins, Nomi has been assailed by loss: her beloved husband, Avi, died of Covid in a Haifa hospital. Her only sister, Jude, and nephew, Jonah, were discovered dead in their old farmhouse across the ocean, on the outskirts of Salem, Massachusetts. Nomi discovers that Jude left the house to her—and although she neither wants to face her estranged mother nor deal with her sister’s estate, she seeks and receives permission to leave her kibbutz to go to America for up to six months.
Nomi loves aspects of kibbutz life—the structure, the security, and working the land. Yet she’s adrift there: the loss of her husband is the loss of the person who tethered her, an outsider, to both his Holocaust-surviving parents and her Hebrew-speaking neighbors. And after an early hysterectomy, she doesn’t have children or grandchildren—another sorrow that haunts her.
With no real ties in the U.S., either, Nomi is thrust into her sister’s life in New England, a place Jude had fled from after a traumatic experience in high school—and to which she had never returned. When she arrives at Jude’s house, Nomi is greeted with offers of help, high praise for her sister, reminders of her own jealousy—and an uninvited opportunity to confront her past.
From the small-town police officer handling her sister’s and nephew’s case, Nomi learns local history, including the tragic story of the original owner of Jude’s house—an early colonist executed for killing her own baby. And on the first night Nomi sleeps in the house, she hears noises from the cellar. What she discovers eventually, is one of a few twists in the book that keep you turning the pages and add depth to the story.
On one level, this novel is about getting to know someone posthumously from the clues they left behind. Through the town and its people, Nomi learns more about her sister and nephew. She also becomes absorbed in a highly annotated book she finds sitting on a table in the farmhouse—the diary of a Jewish woman in hiding with her only son in a farmhouse in WWII Poland; through the annotations, Nomi learns even more about Jude and Jonah. As we read, along with Nomi, other mysteries are added to the novel.
To Die in Secret is a many-layered book. Included is Nomi’s relationship with a young woman named Ruth (yes, Ruth and Nomi; the names are not insignificant), who was sent away by her mother from her Chabad home. This friendship helps Nomi heal old sorrows—her parents, her past boyfriend, her grief over not having children. Ruth’s Jewish feminist pseudo-pagan spirituality stretches Nomi and expands her experience of the divine, infusing new hope and purpose into her life.
There are no loose ends. But this is not a Pollyanna depiction of life. Rather, it’s a complete story, a multi-faceted gem of intergenerational and intercontinental connection, healing, growth, and love.
Esther Goldenberg is the author of The Scrolls of Deborah, a feminist midrash on the lives of the women of Genesis.
