The Magic Maker

• Author: Mickey Dubrow
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: January 14, 2025
• Publisher: Brother Mockingbird 

Thank you to Brother Mockingbird and Mickey Dubrow for sending me a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In 1917 on New York City’s Lower East Side, Baruch Rosenfeld invites a beggar to join his family for the Passover Seder. Baruch’s good deed backfires. He and his wife Rebekah and their children Nathan, Jacob, and Sadie are trapped in time. They don’t age, they can’t leave their three-room apartment, and the outside world believes they disappeared without a trace.

A hundred years later, the apartment building is now the Tenement Museum. Esther Luna, an educator for the museum, sees Sadie at the window. Esther goes to the apartment but finds it has been empty for decades. She hires Rabbi Meir Poppers, a kishef macher (magician), to solve the mystery of the girl at the window. 

Meir’s efforts to free the Rosenfelds are blocked by rivals, ancient spells, and his own self-doubt. When Meir finally reaches the trapped family, will his Jewish magic be enough to rescue the Rosenfelds from their eternal prison?

Although I can’t find any contact info saved for the wonderful person who introduced me to this book, I am incredibly grateful to them. This book is a fun and fantastic exploration of the Jewish experience in 1917 and 2017—how things have stayed the same as well as how they have changed. And the author accomplishes this beautifully. This is a book that I’ll be treasuring and sharing with friends and family.

I want to start this out by saying that I found this book to be wonderfully Jewish and gave me a bit of understanding of what life in New York must have been for my own great-grandmother, who was forced to leave everything behind and flee antisemitism in Poland. She navigated her own way from Poland to the UK and then finally to New York City, where she lived in a tenement building as she rebuilt her life from scratch. I’ve always meant to visit the Tenement Museum to see more about the woman for whom I was named.

With that being said, I do want to make readers who are not as familiar with Jewish practices, customs, beliefs, and languages aware that they might need to keep referring to reliable internet sources to make sense of some of the words that come up in the story. Less commonly encountered words like ‘kishef macher’ are clearly defined, although the words that don’t even stand out to me, like shacharis, mincha, and maariv or the three Jewish prayers for morning, afternoon, and evening, wouldn’t make any sense to anyone who doesn’t have exposure to Judaism, while I was able to define those words based on my Hebrew school experiences as well as knowing that these have always been the descriptions for the different services depending on the time of day that we still use today. 

There isn’t a glossary, and I would hate to see anyone miss out on this book because of a lack of exposure to Judaism. However, I also know the struggle of really getting into a book and constantly having to pause to look things up, so reading this on an e-reader that provides definitions with the tap of a finger might be a better option.

The story is told in two timelines that eventually converge when Esther looks up one day and sees Sadie at the window of an apartment that should be empty. As an educator for the museum, she recruits a colleague to go up and check it out with her. But instead of finding the girl she saw in the window, the apartment doesn’t appear to have been disturbed in a very long time.

In the Rosenfeld timeline, it starts out with a Passover seder. The author has an outstanding skill at setting a scene—I was able to fully envision myself in the story easily with the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels all described so beautifully while avoiding info dumping or overly descriptive writing that can pull me out of the story. Dubrow is able to set a vivid scene within a couple of sentences, and I relished the scene with the Passover Seder, a ritual that has carried on nearly unchanged since the destruction of the second Jewish temple in 70 CE. While each family or diasporic group may have some unique customs practiced, the overall seder is done the same way around the world, as it has been for more than 2,000 years.

The New York of 1917 was full of immigrants: not just Jews, but Italians, Irish, German, and Black people as well. Dubrow sets the Rosenfeld family right at the heart of the building, story, and museum, as we learn about who the Rosenfeld family were in life. I loved that both Baruch and Rebekah are examples of living Jewishly. They may not have much, but Rebekah takes pride in her role as the heart of the home, and the emotional connection for the rest of the family. Baruch may not have much, but as Jews, we are taught to always be generous towards those in need, and to try to make the world a better place than we found it, one kind gesture at a time. So Baruch, unsurprisingly, invites a Jewish man who is on the streets to his family’s seder. And this kind gesture is what ultimately dooms his family to a century of being trapped in time, unable to leave their tiny apartment. 

In the 2017 timeline, Esther doesn’t know where else to turn, and finds herself seeking out the assistance of Rabbi Meir Poppers, kishef macher, in getting to the bottom of what is happening at the Tenement Museum. Meir comes to New York City and quickly ascertains some of what is at play, only to keep finding his path blocked in different ways—a rival group to his own, unfamiliar and ancient spells, and fears that he won’t be able to save the family. 

Part of what I loved about this story, is that is challenges readers to acknowledge biases that we may not even be aware of. Esther Luna and her husband, Gustavo Ramos, are both Puerto Rican, although Esther has obtained her degree in Jewish studies and can read and understand both Hebrew and Yiddish—two words that use the same alphabet, but are vastly different and mutually incomprehensible. I like that the author challenged the belief that the only people in Jewish studies majors are … Jews. Esther is a fantastic character all-around. She’s funny, super smart, and has a huge heart, and her husband knows exactly how lucky he is to have her. 

In addition, this story never veers away from the discussions that I can recall having with my parents. Their experiences were vastly different: my mother was born in New York and was at least two generations away from her nearest ancestor’s experience as an immigrant, while my father was a Holocaust survivor who left a refugee camp (actually a converted death camp) in Austria to make his way to the United States eventually. Talks about what kind of assimilation is okay and encouraged and what kind is unacceptable occur even to this day. In the first seder since the passing of my father, we attempted to have each of my brothers lead the Passover Seder. One refused, the other tried and struggled with it. On the second night, my mother pushed me to take the reins and lead the seder, and I heard a similar sentiment at my own table: you can’t lead a seder if you’re a woman. I calmly pointed out that nowhere did it say that the leader of a seder must have a penis. After I proceeded to make my father proud with that seder, my family no longer has issues with a female leading a holiday dinner.

My apologies, I have gotten slightly derailed. Suffice it to say that I was able to really identify with so many scenes in this book, and found it so enjoyable to see myself within the pages of this book. The fact that it was a Jewish book, written by a Jewish author, already had me primed to like this book, but I honestly wasn’t expecting to fall for all of the characters like I did. Well, there were one or two characters that I didn’t like, but the majority of the characters earned a spot in my heart. The way that Jewish magic was represented, viewed as a responsibility requiring intensive studying made me think of this as kind of the quintessentially thought of school of magic, except that it is for Jewish magicians only, and takes place at a yeshiva (private schools for Jewish students).

Overall, this was the kind of book that I love and then obviously demand that all my loved ones read it, and one of my non-Jewish besties has already told me she wants to read it. Naturally, I offered to help her understand the many Jewish terms if she needs assistance. In my opinion, the fast-moving plot caught my attention, although it was my love for the Yiddishkeit (Jewishness) of this book and nearly all of the characters that kept me invested in the book. I seriously wasn’t able to leave the house without my copy of this book, so I can enthusiastically recommend this to all readers that like fantasy and historical fiction, paired with a healthy dose of Jewish joy and plenty of humor. Is there  even maybe a dash of romance? You’d have to ask the shadchanit (woman who is a matchmaker) in charge of finding Rabbi Poppers his bashert (soulmate), or just read the book. 

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