The Tinker's Son

The Tinker's Son illuminates the painful moral choices faced by a rabbinical student in 1870s Imperial Russia after he is drafted into the Tsar's army and unwittingly hurts the woman he loves.

This work of historical fiction, the second novel by the journalist Paul Horvitz, is a wartime love story. Yakov Leibovich, a brilliant but inexperienced young man, is constrained by the traditions of his faith. His isolated shtetl life in the Pale of Settlement, a vast ghetto that crimps the aspiratio...