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Practice writing and read good books.>
Sam reviews Anita Diamant's The Red Tent
March 1, 2010
Updated 9 March.
“You have to,” my wife insisted, “read the Red Tent because of its descriptions and dialogue.”
So here I am, having read the book, ready to give the potential reader my view of this New York Times bestseller.
Men, this book is for you.
Forget the women. They already understand this stuff.
This is insight we men rarely get from the pap written in the magazines selling on grocery shelves and in modern novels. It is romance described in all its beauty in the context of an authentic love story from the Bible, rather than romance contrived by a bestselling pulp fiction author.
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The story mirrors Genesis and begins with Jacob when he is sent by his mother Rebekah to stay with her brother Laban. The hope is that he will be safe from her older son’s anger and find a wife.
The narrator, Dinah, is mentioned only briefly in Genesis. As she tells us when introducing herself, she is a mere footnote in the story of Jacob and Joseph — the daughter of Jacob’s wife Leah, a young girl whose illicit relationship with a Prince will bring calamity to all around her.
The author takes this footnote in Scripture and weaves it into an intricate story about the women of Genesis.
The Red Tent is striking for its powerful portrayal of the very essence of being a woman. How women communicate, how they view marriage, how they harness their passions and how they support one another in a society that does not grant them the same status as men.
A woman who enters the week of her menstrual period finds refreshment and relief from the daily duties of caretaking inside a refuge called the red tent. A jealously guarded sanctuary reserved for women who can birth children, the red tent is off limits to men and small children.
The story of Dinah’s entry into womanhood and the happiness it brings to her mother and relatives, and the celebration it spawns is described beginning on page 171. It is a haunting contrast to how some women today reject the joy of being a woman and mother for the “joys” of acting like a man and the freedom to life live for herself.
This passage is not only the beginning of the end of the red tent and its nurturing of womanhood and motherhood, but it begins the story of Dinah in earnest.
It starts with an account of how Dinah learns the skills of midwifery from her mother’s sister and Jacob’s wife, Rachel.
Eventually Dinah is sent to serve a woman in the palace at the bidding of the King, and while there she falls in love with the King’s firstborn son, Shelem. Shelem is as smitten with Dinah as she is with he, and the Queen arranges for Dinah and Shelem to find themselves alone and for nature to take its course. And take its course it does. After a week together under the watchful eye of the Queen, Shelem tells his father that he wants the beautiful Dinah as his wife.
When the King approaches Jacob to seal the marriage he has decided is a given, Jacob is not pleased to find himself confronted with a fait accompli. He sends the King away saying he has to speak with his sons about the matter before he can agree to the marriage.
After the King departs, Jacob has harsh words for Dinah’s mother, Leah, who is unaware that her daughter has fallen in love and has been claimed by the Prince of Shechem. When she learns that her daughter will be lost to foreign women and likely to forget her mother, she too becomes angry.
Dinah is sure that her family will be as thrilled as she is with the relationship she has consummated on her own, but her brothers are especially unhappy.
It is interesting that Dinah never stops to consider that her actions might be selfish and are in complete disregard for how her parents might feel about the union between herself and a “foreigner” during a time when parents believed it was their right to influence who their daughters married.
Jacob finally agrees to the marriage if the men of Shechem are circumcised. The men of Shechem agree, but on the third day when the men are sick and weak, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, murder all the men of the city including the King and his son the Prince.
As expected, Dinah is devastated at the loss of her husband-to-be and never forgives her brothers.
It is profound that she never entertains the thought that she might be accountable for her role in bringing catastrophe upon her family and lover. Even in the end she rails against her father for never mentioning her name after the events of that night and her unexplained disappearance.
Jacob is forced to flee with his family after the slaughter and return to his father Isaac and brother Esau. When Jacob is preparing to enter the Promised Land, Genesis tells us that God gives Jacob a new name, Israel, and that he gives all that belonged to Abraham and Isaac to him.
Ms. Diamant cynically suggests otherwise.
Jacob takes the new name, she suggests, “so people would not remember the butcher of Shechem”. God is left out of the picture. So it is with the renaming of Benjamin by Jacob, to which she also ascribes devious motivation.
Part Three of the book is a fictional account written by the author that tells the story of Dinah’s life: the birth of her son, service as a midwife, the growth of her son into an adult in Egypt mostly separate from her, and finally finding happiness with another man.
The story rejoins Scripture with the introduction of Joseph, and unbeknownst to Joseph, Dinah’s son as his lieutenant.
I admit that the malice leveled at Joseph by the author caught me by surprise. In Christian circles, Joseph is a revered character with great wisdom and steeped in God's favor.
Ms. Diamant makes Joseph a scoundrel with a liberal reinterpretation of Genesis, which gives us no inkling that Joseph was sodomized by his master Potifar or a philanderer who took liberties with his master’s wife.
From Dinah’s son: “He [Joseph] is illiterate. He cannot cipher or read or write, which is why the King assigned me, the best of Kar’s students, to be his right hand. And that is where I am now, wifeless, childless, second to a barbarian.”
From Joseph’s wife’s maid:
“Zafenat Paneh-ah [Joseph] is truly an arrogant son of a bitch.”
“Zafanet Paneh-ah did not acquire that pompous name until recently. ‘The God Speaks and He Lives,’ indeed!”
“Potifar loved the Canaanite boy [Joseph] and used him for his own pleasure. But Potifar’s wife, a great beauty called Nebetper, also looked upon him with longing, and the two of them became lovers right under the master’s nose…So in a great show of anger and vengeance, he sent Stick [Joseph] to prison.”
“It was not a difficult dream to divine if you ask me…Any half-wit magician who pulls birds from beneath baskets in the marketplace could have interpreted that one…But the dreams haunted and frightened the idiot King…And so he invited the jailer [Joseph], an unlettered foreign-born conniver, to become his first-in-command.”
It is here that Dinah rejoins the story recounted in Genesis, but with a twist. Dinah is the one brought to the palace to deliver Joseph’s firstborn son. She realizes that the vizier is her brother, and they reconcile. Dinah returns home and falls into the routine of a contented existence.
When Joseph is called to honor Jacob on his deathbed, the author has him ascribing guilt as the reason for Jacob’s desire to bless his sons over those of Reuben, Judah and Benjamin. This again is inconsistent with Scripture’s portrayal of events.
When Joseph and Dinah visit Jacob and Dinah meets with the children of her brothers, Dinah finds the peace and closure that lets her live out the rest of her days with joy.
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Diamant is a master of description and conversation. She paints vivid images of life and death. Her characters come alive in the pages because of the way she portrays them with words.
It is sad that her portrayal of womanhood is associated with pagan rituals. It is odd that paganism in her story is the liberator of femininity, and religion the enemy. Today it is precisely the opposite: Christianity is the perpetrator of femininity, a blight on women, while feminism — ironically the rejection of femininity — is the liberator of true womanhood.
It is a striking contrast that became real for me in this story.
The Red Tent is a fascinating tale that puts cloth on the bones of Scripture. While we might not agree with some of her interpretations, Diamant’s fine writing makes The Red Tent a worthwhile journey for all dedicated readers — male and female.
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