The Intuitive: Synopsis
It is 1913, and Zorah Baldwin, age 27, has returned after the accidental, violent death of her husband and young son to her childhood home on New York’s Washington Square. There, living with her gentle but emotionally downtrodden father and cold and manipulative mother, she meets Henry Herbert Goddard, director of research at the Vineland School in New Jersey, a school and home for the “feebleminded.” Believing that Zorah, a former debutante and part of New York’s elite social scene, is a natural “intuitive,” Goddard persuades her to volunteer to work on a program whereby women with purported special skills pick out “moron” immigrants on sight.
Zorah’s tidy boundaries are challenged one day when she sends for testing a woman who appears to be having some kind of breakdown. A skirmish ensues involving the woman’s sister, who screams an old Yiddish curse at her: “a dark dream on your head, hands, and feet.” What could that mean? As the story goes on, the meaning shifts as Zorah comes to know herself—and the wider world—better.
When Daniel Levy, an attractive Jewish doctor at Ellis Island, inquires whether she might be able to take in his cousin Sophia, a wealthy St. Petersburg widow fleeing her own grief at the death of her family in an anarchist bombing, Zorah surprises herself by saying yes. Sophia is regal and sophisticated, well educated and wealthy. She throws herself into her new life with a courage and energy that causes Zorah to question why she has been unable to do so herself. With Sophia, Zorah explores the Lower East Side and the quirky, bohemian world of Greenwich Village, getting involved with garment workers, unions, and women’s suffrage.
Meanwhile the mutual attraction between Daniel Levy and Zorah continues to confound them both. It is not just the social implications of a relationship between a Jew and a Christian that keeps them at wary distance from each other, but Zora’s lingering grief over the loss of her family, and a feeling that to be happy again would betray them. Drawn in by a fascination she can’t really explain for the lives of the family of the woman who cursed her, she discovers in fourteen-year-old Shoshana Pinsker, a chance for her own redemption and fresh start, until the declaration of World War I threatens to shatter her hopes again.
