Name: Letters from Rifka
ISBN: 9780140363913

Karen Hesse

In letters to her cousin, a young Jewish girl chronicles her family's flight from Russia in 1919 and her own experiences when she must be left in Belgium for a while when the others immigrate to America.

Letters from Rifka

Missy Zuber 

Diary of a young Russian Jewish girl and her struggles while immigrating to the United States in the 1910s. The entries are written in the borders and blank areas of a book of poetry.

First read when I was in sixth or seventh grade.

Jeni Enjaian

After how much I loved Phoenix Rising by the same author, I found myself disappointed with this book. Hesse did not write a bad book. This was just not a book for me. I knew that from the start when I discovered that Hesse wrote the book using an epistolary format. I think that this format can work but it really rubs me the wrong way when the letters do not take actual letter form. By that I mean, the letters become a story. They take on the format of a regular narrative with the paragraph structure and dialogue and thought narration. People do not write letters like this. People do not write diaries like this. I read a lot of the "Diary of America" books which take this format and while I enjoyed them, I also had the same difficulty with it.
In the end, I just did not connect with Rifka which made this a difficult book to love. However, Hesse does portray a true story, a story based on the life of one of her family members, which kept the events of the narrative grounded in reality and redeemed the choice of an epistolary format.