Have you ever bought a book to give as a gift to someone else - something you thought they would like - and started reading it and been unable to put it down?
I bought Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent" for a friend of mine who is way more traditionally religious than me. But oh how I love this book so - good thing my friend had to cancell our plan to meet up for gift trading during the Christmas season - I'm keeping this one for me!
I realized that the book's appeal to me was quite like the appeal of Jean Auel's Earth Children series (Clan of the Cave Bear and on) because like Auel, who brings to life the time when humans worshiped cave bears and lived in mammoth bone huts, Diamant has brought to life once more the reality of women's lives in the middle east when a man, a patriarch like Jacob, took several wives. You may have heard of some of the children of Jacob; Reuben, Simon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Naphtali, Isschar, and Dinah.
The red tent is the tent in which only women of the tribe are allowed, where they have their periods and give birth with the help of other women. Through this book I became intensely aware of ancient women who lived around their biology and circumstances in life, how dependent they were on each other and how their status in the family had so much to do with their child bearing success, and what it might have been like to be a first, second, third, or fourth wife, to be loved and afforded or abused and sold.
The story is that of Dinah, the child of Jacob and his first wife, Leah, who is a fertile mother who has had all sons before this long wanted daughter. While this book is certainly an imaging of what these characters lives must have been, it is based on the bible, historical and cultural research, and the evidence of the life of Dinah which has been lost to us.
At the front of the book, there is a genealogy chart of the characters, which is helpful
This book focuses on the life of Dinah.
Picador USA is the publisher and the work is C 1997 Anita Diamant
