At the beginning of Sisters of Fortune by Esther Chehebar, Fortune is sharing her thoughts and worries about her life as she is about to get married. Her two other sisters, Lucy and Nina, are far from this moment, but until the end of the book, there will be a reversal of events during which the sisters will start writing their own love and life stories.
Set in the midst of the relatively clustered Jewish-Syrian community, this book is beautifully told, with a very vivid language - I had access to the book in audiobook format, excellently dramatised - that makes justice to the less represented world of the Syrian Jews. (The author explained herself why she wrote this book in this interview with Lilith. )
Through the story of the sisters´ parents we hear the echoes of the usual immigrant story struggling with acceptance, but it gets the colours of Aleppo or Damascus, and the longing for the food, language and a very special way of life and seen things. I was only a bit surprised to read how modern and emancipated the girls were, being allowed to ´date´ for long, spend time alone with their boyfriends and even come late at the break of the sun. Ah, and they also wear jeans. It sounded a bit too much for an obvious observant Syrian Jewish family.
The three sisters, particularly Fortune, are however submitted to the expectations of their community, where there is also gossip and lots of idle talk. Fortune decision to break up the engagement and assume the freedom of making her own mistakes - without being ostracized by the community and her parents - was for me the favourite part of the story.
Literarily, I enjoyed how the alternate stories of the sisters operate by fragments, with details resurfacing a bit later, without being explained into detail, so that we, the readers, we can figure out by ourselves what may have happened.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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