• First published in 1999 by W. W. Norton.
• Paperback edition published in 2000 by Ballantine Books.

Synopsis

When free-spirited Batsheva moves into the close-knit Orthodox community of Memphis, Tennessee, the already precarious relationship between the Ladies Auxiliary and their teenage daughters is shaken to the core. In this extraordinary novel, Tova Mirvis takes us into the fascinating and insular world of the Memphis Orthodox Jews, one ripe with tradition and contradiction. Warm and wise, enchanting and funny, The Ladies Auxiliary brilliantly illuminates the timeless struggle between mothers and daughters, family and self, religious freedom and personal revelation, honoring the past and facing the future. An unforgettable story of uncommon atmosphere, profound insight, and winning humor, The Ladies Auxiliary is a triumphant work of fiction. (W. W. Norton)

From the Author

The idea for The Ladies Auxiliary first came to me over coffee with a friend in New York. My friend had recently converted to Judaism. She struck me as someone who was different, who followed her own mind without worrying about what other people thought of her. I was telling her about the close-knit world of the Memphis Orthodox Jewish community where I grew up, and at one point she jokingly asked me, "What if I moved to Memphis?" I looked at her and thought, "My God, what if you did?"

My friend's comment inspired me to think about the way an outsider can challenge a world like the one I had grown up in. In this community everyone knows everyone else, and most people are related in some way. People feel rooted in the city; it is a community that goes back several generations. I am a fifth generation Memphian on one side, and most of my family still lives there. My great grandfather started the Jewish newspaper; my grandparents helped found the Jewish day school there. I grew up feeling thatI had a place, that I was connected to a community and a tradition.

But I also felt that there was little room to be different. There was a strong pressure to conform to a narrow definition of how you were supposed to be, and it was considered wrong to question anything about the community. For me, this was often suffocating, and ultimately I chose to live in a place that was more open.

Writing this novel was a way to explore my own relationship to this community. Adopting the point of view of the women of the Ladies Auxiliary, I began to understand their impulse to preserve a way of life that sometimes felt as if it was slipping away. I missed the sense of kinship that I grew up with. I missed being rooted in a place and having deep connections to a city and the people who live there. But I also felt the difficulty of trying to live in such a close-knit world. I discovered that writing about the community where I grew up separated me more from it. It was as if I had broken a pact not to reveal the inner workings of this world and could never be inside of it again. But for me, part of being a writer means looking honestly at my own world and asking questions about it.

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