Queen Esther
A novel
After 40 years, John Irving revisits the setting of his classic novel, The Cider House Rules—the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, where a Jewish girl, not yet four, is abandoned one winter night.
Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine; anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In the orphanage at St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr. Larch that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish; she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; he won’t find any family who’ll adopt her.
When Esther is fourteen, about to become a ward…