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 of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows—a philanthropic family with a history of providing foster care for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they detest anti-Semitism and like-minded prejudice. Esther’s gratitude to the Winslows is unending. While she retraces her steps to her birth city, Esther never stops loving and protecting the Winslows—not even in Vienna.
In the final chapter of this historical novel—set in Jerusalem, in 1981—Esther Nacht is seventy-six.