The Red Tent
by Anita Diamant

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 321
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312195516
Publisher: Picador USA

Anita Diamant is a prize-winning journalist whose work has appeared regularly in the Boston Globe Magazine and Parenting magazine. She is the author of five books about contemporary Jewish practice: CHOOSING A JEWISH LIFE, BIBLE BABY NAMES, THE NEW JEWISH BABY BOOK, THE NEW JEWISH WEDDING, and LIVING A JEWISH LIFE (with H. Cooper). She lives in West Newton, MA, with her husband and daughter, Emilia, to whom the book is dedicated.

Diamant says it was the relationship between Leah and Rachel that stimulated her thinking about THE RED TENT. "The Biblical story that pits the tow sisters against one another never sat right with me. The traditional view of Leah as the ugly and/or spiteful sister, and of Jacob as indifferent to her, seemed odd in light of the fact that the Bible gives them nine children together…As I re-read Genesis over the years, I settled on the story of Dinah, their daughter. The drama and her total silence (Dinah does not utter a single word in the Bible) cried out for explanation, and I decided to imagine one."

Aiding her work was "midrash," the ancient and still vital literary form, which means "search" or "investigation."

"Historically, the rabbis used this highly imaginative form of storytelling to make sense of the elliptical nature of the Bible—to explain, for example, why Cain killed Abel…The compressed stories and images in the Bible are rather like photographs. They don’t tell us everything we want or need to know. Midrash is the story about what happened before and after the photographic flash."

She points out that "THE RED TENT is not a translation but a work of fiction. Its perspective and focus—by and about the female characters—distinguishes it from the Biblical account in which women are usually peripheral and often totally silent. By giving Dinah a voice and by providing texture and content to the sketchy Biblical descriptions, my book is a radical departure from the historical text."

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