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January 14, 2000/7 Shevat 5760, Vol. 52, No.19
Woman's voice: 'Red Tent' tells other side of story
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
What if . . .
Novelist Anita Diamant takes a fragment of Torah text, the story of the rape of Jacob's only daughter and vengeance of her brothers, and fleshes it out with real-life characters, larger than life emotions and compelling dramatic action in "The Red Tent" (Picador USA, $14, softcover).
Writing historical fiction in the tradition of Biblical midrash, Diamant gives voice to the besmirched maiden and affecting poignancy to her story while creating a rich picture of feminist life in Biblical times. Women's work - cooking, baking, weaving - is detailed with careful accuracy, a result of Diamant's painstaking historical research. She attempts to capture what it really was like to be a woman in Biblical times.
"I wanted to know how they made cloth from wool, what the sleeping arrangements were, what their furniture and clothes looked like," Diamant told Jewish News.
Diamant says she studied Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Canaanite culture before sitting down to write her first novel.
"I tried not to make historical mistakes," says the author, a widely-published journalist who is also the author of five handbooks on Jewish life, including "The New Jewish Baby Book" and "The New Jewish Wedding Book."
But Diamant makes clear that she used Biblical text only as a starting point and historical context simply as a setting. After that, she let her imagination take over, crafting a powerful novel of love and loss. Writing in first person as Dinah, Diamant retells her sorrowful story from the beginning, allowing the reader to experience life in Jacob's tents from the unique perspective first of a young girl, then of a mature woman. The technique allows Diamant to delve into the hearts and minds of her characters, dissecting the complex web of personal relationships that existed among the women of the times and their intense emotional power. Dinah is the daughter of Leah, who, according to the Biblical text, Jacob mistakenly takes as his first wife, instead of her younger sister, Rachel. Rachel, who later becomes Jacob's wife as well, is Dinah's aunt, as are the two servants Bilhah and Zilpah who later bear children with Jacob. Diamant imagines the family dynamics with one father and four wives and creates a fascinating fictive picture equal to any depiction of today's contemporary social reality with its own complexities wrought from divorce, remarriage and blended families.
"I suppose it's only natural to assume that Leah was always jealous of Rachel," Diamant writes. "And it was true that Leah did not sing or smile much during Jacob's week with Rachel. Indeed, over the years, whenever my father took my beautiful aunt to his bed, my mother kept her head bent over her work, which grew as her sons increased and as Jacob's labors yielded more wool to be woven."
The red tent, where the women of the tribe, Jacob's wives, servants and daughters, would retire while menstruating, separating from the men according to Jewish law, becomes a refuge for feminist communion and companionship. It's here that the women mark the passage to womanhood, celebrate the joys of pregnancy and experience the pain of childbirth.
The literary device serves Diamant well in providing a purely feminist setting for giving voice to the unique thoughts and feelings of the women in the tribal culture, a voice that remains silent in the original Biblical text.
Diamant, as Dinah, speaks to her readers of that silence, "And now you have come to me - women with hands and feet as soft as a queen's, with more cooking pots than you need, so safe in childbed and so free with your tongues. You come hungry for the story that was lost. You crave words to fill the great silence that swallowed me, and my mothers, and my grandmothers before them."
Diamant's story, her what ifs, begins with the possibility that Dinah may have indeed been in love with her suitor, that in compromising her virtue she was willingly giving herself to the man she loved. She goes on to imagine what might have happened to Dinah after her beloved Shalem is slaughtered by her brothers, following her grieving mother-in-law back to Egypt, bearing a son and watching him grow into a prince of Egypt.
Diamant insists that she did not write a Biblical midrash.
"I looked at the commentary and turned away," she says.
Yet in turning away, she freed herself to read, and write, the poignant story between the lines, providing an imaginative look at the feminist side of Biblical life.
Reaction from the religious community to the book has been mixed, says Diamant. It has been called "an abomination" by some Orthodox rabbis, she says, because they were looking at it as a Torah commentary, not an historical novel.
Mostly, she says, she has received "wonderful response from rabbis." Diamant, whose early Jewish education was minimal, describes herself as an "adult learner." She is "not a scholar."
She says she is delighted with the book's success.
"I've had women say (after reading "The Red Tent") it is the first time they have picked up the Bible in 25 years." Many go back to the text in Genesis 34:1-31 that tells Dinah's story.
Will she draw on Biblical themes for her next novel?
No, says Diamant from her Massachusetts home. "My next novel is contemporary."
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