The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

• Author: Sarit Yishai-Levi
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: April 5, 2016
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne 

The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem is a dazzling novel of mothers and daughters, stories told and untold, and the binds that tie four generations of women.

Gabriela’s mother Luna is the most beautiful woman in all of Jerusalem, though her famed beauty and charm seem to be reserved for everyone but her daughter. Ever since Gabriela can remember, she and Luna have struggled to connect. But when tragedy strikes, Gabriela senses there’s more to her mother than painted nails and lips.

Desperate to understand their relationship, Gabriela pieces together the stories of her family’s previous generations—from Great-Grandmother Mercada the renowned healer, to Grandma Rosa who cleaned houses for the English, to Luna who had the nicest legs in Jerusalem. But as she uncovers shocking secrets, forbidden romances, and the family curse that links the women together, Gabriela must face a past and present far more complex than she ever imagined.

Set against the Golden Age of Hollywood, the dark days of World War II, and the swingin’ ’70s, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem follows generations of unforgettable women as they forge their own paths through times of dramatic change. With great humor and heart, Sarit Yishai-Levi has given us a powerful story of love and forgiveness—and the unexpected and enchanting places we find each.

I’ve had my eye on this book for so long, and I was able to check this one out from the library. It’s a family saga, telling the story of four generations of a Jewish family living in Jerusalem under various colonizing regimes, including the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate for Palestine. The book was absolutely riveting, and I can see why it was made into a show. I only hope the show does justice to the book.

To start with, the fact that it is a Jewish historical fiction moving through the major events in one family over the course of most of the 20th century, a period of major changes in the family as well as the region itself. It begins in the 1920s, and features a family of Jews who clings tightly to their Sephardic culture, even amidst spending a long time residing in Jerusalem.

Quick note: Sepharad in Hebrew means Spain, and so Sephardic Jews spent their time in diaspora in the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish Inquisition led to forced conversions and expulsions, and many Sephardic Jews fled to the New World (is there a better term for this, because I dislike the implications of a New/Old World), but others fled into the comparative freedom of the Ottoman Empire. They frequently spoke Ladino (which you can learn more about here), and this is a theme that runs throughout the story—one where your family and your cultural practices are to be preserved and honored, no matter what. 

The family stays in Jerusalem, living in a Sephardic neighborhood in Jerusalem, and their lives are absolutely fascinating. The amount of factual historical events that are included in the storyline coincide with a fraught timeline in the country, and each generation has their own challenges and joys. It starts with Gabriela talking about the family from her perspective. But where the book really shines is in its characterization of the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters.

Gabriela and her mother didn’t get along, but she found a lot of comfort in her relationships to the other women in her family—her grandmother and aunts are the ones she can turn to for anything. Her grandmother is the one that tells her about how the Ermosa women are cursed with men who don’t want them, and vice versa. And the perspective shifts from Gabriela to the past, and we get to see the circumstances that created the factors that majorly influence characters lives for the remainder of the book.

We get to see the circumstances around the pivotal events in Raphael Ermosa’s young life, where he falls in love with an Ashkenazi woman named Rochel, but his mother is the one who runs the show and decides that he will not be marrying anyone other than an appropriate Sephardic woman, or else it would go completely against societal expectations at the time. And when his mother, Mercada, forces him to get married to Rosa, she has no idea about how that would affect the lives of future generations.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and Barrie Kreinik did such a fantastic job with the narration. There are so many Ladino words and phrases present in the book, and it is a beautiful language, leading me to the audiobook over an ebook. Ladino is wonderful to hear, and there are some similarities to Spanish, so certain words were easily recognizable. In particular, pishcado y limon means fish and lemon, and was uttered many times throughout the story as a charm to protect against the evil eye. I’d recognize the certain way things were said, even in my own family, like ‘tu tu tu, may their name be erased,’ miming a spitting motion. I guess it’s just something that we all grow up hearing from the older family members?

The romance between Rochel and Raphael was fascinating to read, even if it was way too short. Instead, he’s married off to a woman who cleans houses for the British, a significant step down in class for someone of Raphael’s standing in society. In time, Rosa gives him three daughters, who are the joy of Raphael’s life, after he thought there wouldn’t be any more happiness. He was a highly involved and loving father, if not a loving husband. But the unhealthy relationship between Rosa and Raphael trickles down and influences the girls’ relationships with their parents. Luna in particular, is a difficult child who never got along with her own mother. So it isn’t much of a surprise that she and Gabriela never get along. But Luna’s own life was one marked by some serious tragedies, even as she is quickly known as the most beautiful woman in Jerusalem, or the beauty queen.

A book like this is an intriguing, engrossing, and enjoyable journey through a past full of joys and sorrows, curses and successes, love and hurt, and the peculiar nature of the relationships between women and their mothers. The pace was steady, and I was never bored. Yishai-Levi’s writing makes it easy to visualize the streets of Jerusalem under British control, and as the new nation of Israel coped with existential threats right after it announced its independence. This complicated and often unhappy family won my heart, and I especially loved how things went full circle, coming back to Gabriela and her own life. I am so glad that I finally got the chance to read this book, and loved how each of the women are strong, resilient, and show their own growth over the course of the book, from Mercada Ermosa down to Gabriela.

You might enjoy this one if you:

• Like historical fiction or family sagas.
• Love reading about families that may or may not be as dysfunctional as your own.
• Want to see what it was like in the decades before and after Israel became an independent nation, and how it affected individuals. 
• Wish there were more Sephardic stories being told.

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