The Red Tent

Rating:
Summary: transformational
Review: I was intrigued from the very first sentence of this book. In this piece of fictional history, Anita Diamant gives a voice to women whose stories have long been forgotten or ignored. She does a favor to all women by reviving this sisterhood. The Red Tent is one of my top 5 favorite books. I recommend it to everyone that I know.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: A solid look at the positives and negatives of women's relationships with themselves and each other.

Rating:
Summary: Another side of the Bibel story
Review: It is said that the story told in The Red Tent is like it would have been if the Bible were written by women.
The main character in the book is Dinah. She is the daughter of Jacob and the sister of his 12 sons from the book of Genesis. We only get a tiny little hint on Dinah in the Bibel story, here in the book we meet first a little girl, deeply loved and spoiled by her mothers, the four wives of Jacob, later she is growing up to be a strong woman, living in a remarkable period of early history.
The Red Tent tells a story of bounds between women, strong women in a society where the most important is to be a man, a strong man. Anita Diamant tells us a story it is easy to believe in. It could all have happend this way. Her pen make this period of history glow, the storytelling is so rich and the people come alive even in our world of 2001.
Thank you Anita Diamant for giving me this story, reading the first books in the Bibel will never be the same for me after this. You have helped me to start using my imagination to read the story behind the story.
Britt Arnhild Lindland

Rating:
Summary: The story behind
Review: It is said that the story told in The Red Tent is like it would have been if the Bible were written by women.

The main character in the book is Dinah. She is the daughter of Jacob and the sister of his 12 sons from the book of Genesis. We only get a tiny little hint on Dinah in the Bibel story, here in the book we meet first a little girl, deeply loved and spoiled by her mothers, the four wives of Jacob, later she is growing up to be a strong woman, living in a remarkable period of early history.

The Red Tent tells a story of bounds between women, strong women in a society where the most important is to be a man, a strong man. Anita Diamant tells us a story it is easy to believe in. It could all have happend this way. Her pen make this period of history glow, the storytelling is so rich and the people come alive even in our world of 2001.

Thank you Anita Diamant for giving me this story, reading the first books in the Bibel will never be the same for me after this. You have helped me to start using my imagination to read the story behind the story.
Britt Arnhild Lindland

Rating:
Summary: Feeling not faith
Review: This is a sensual tour de force. Diamant lovingly describes the richness of sensations Dinah experiences in her life: the feel and smell of the midwives' herbs and medications; the taste of her lover's mouth; the strength of a river's current when her family forded. The sexual scenes were among the most effective I have read. The entire book reminded me, ironically, of the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd's recent biography of Thomas More.

As a work of fiction, it shows great imagination. The plot's deviation from the story in the Bible is almost (although not quite) entirely credible. Conjuring the relations between women of 4,000 years ago, and even creating an entire women-centered religion, are praiseworthy accomplishments.

That said, other aspects disappoint and annoy.

The tone of the writing appears intended to breathe heightened significance into the actions of the women in the community. I have the unconfirmed feeling that this is a literary decision bordering on the political, a way of making this book feel as important as the Bible. Unfortunately, the righteous descriptions of people's sensations and reactions felt more like an educated alcoholic's expatiation on some happy aspect of their lives: it feels almost maudlin, rather than important.

One can enjoy this as a great work of imagination, a description of a past that never was, just as the Harry Potter books are a great romp through a magical world that doesn't exist. However, Diamant wrote this to tell us something about our world today. Women chafe under the determination of the men, except when they act in realms unknown to males (childbirth, menstruation, worship of the Great Mother). Women's stories are recovered from the dustbin of history, and given greater attention than those androcentric stories our patriarchal culture has allowed to be passed down for the last 40 centuries. Worship of "El," the monotheistic practice that started us on today's paths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is just another option in the panoply of pagan practices. The message for today is that organized religion doesn't address women's spiritual needs, but paganism does.

The problem with Diamant's underlying message is that she misses the revolutionary nature of Abram's and Jacob's practice. If you believe that the Jews reached a fundamentally new understanding of God, you cannot enjoy this book.

I'll focus on Leah's reaction to Reuben's circumcision, on page 42. Dinah describes how unsure Jacob was about whether and how he would perform the operation. The next paragraph opens with "still, it had to be done." Leah agonizes and feels sick over the coming "mutilation" of her son. Further in the paragraph, we learn that the foreskin means nothing to Leah - so she doesn't care whether he gets circumcised after all? The paragraph ends with the women in the Red Tent laughing at the delicate equipment men carry between their legs.

To summarize, this fellow Jacob shows up as a stranger to a tribe in some isolated hills in Palestine. He marries several of the women, then declares that his understanding of his obligation to the one God requires him to cut off the foreskin of his sons' penises. The women react to this by saying "whatever - just as long as we can still make fun of what you're born with between your legs."

The Red Tent posits that it is somehow an injustice that we have preserved the men's stories from those days, and not the women's. While Dinah's story is remarkable, and she lives a wealth of interesting experiences, Diamant never suggests anything in her story worth saving over four millenia; certainly the women's response to circumcision is forgettable, particularly when one considers the significance of circumcision.

Circumcision was a sign of the covenant between God and His people after Abram showed faith. It is a vitally important part of the Jewish religion at the time. It is connected to the amazing and disturbing story of Abram being willing to murder his son Isaac because a voice in his head, which Abram recognized as God, told him to do so. The story and the rite have been preserved for centuries because they plumb the depths of our souls and help to bring us into a new relationship with the divine. They say something deeply meaningful to us even today, and in every age. I recommend reading Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, for further understanding of the horror and majesty of this story.

This new religion broke with prior pagan religions in that it was based on faith, rather than material gain. It required faith to practice, and the reward was faith. Dinah and the other women get material and sensual benefits from their polytheistic worship of wooden statues and other gods: her curses to her brothers are seen as effective, she feels an oceanic unity with womanhood on her first menstrual period, she prays to the gods so that women facing a death in childbirth live. But she doesn't have faith, which is everything (according to Kierkegaard, and according to monotheistic religion). Faith is the trusting relationship with God, the peace that knows no understanding (for who can understand Abram's peaceful resolution to murder his son?). As the individual relationship with God, faith is democratic - accessible to all, regardless of sex or social position - and freeing. "Oppression" means nothing to a person who has faith; the person with faith overcomes it. Despite today's female elite fashion to scorn monotheistic, "patriarchal" religion, that kind of religion offers the most effective way today to overcome perceived discrimination.

This brings me to the opening of the paragraph I mention above - "still, it [circumcision] had to be done." Why, if Leah felt sick about the pending mutilation? Jacob was one man in a solitary community. His father-in-law, Laban, was not part of the covenant, and probably couldn't care less. Surely Leah could have enlisted her sisters to oppose this, if she felt afraid on her own. In previous pages, we learned that the women in Palestine could determine which of their sons received the father's birthright and which received his blessing. The implied answer, "that some man decided it and the women had no say," does not make sense. The domestic power arrangement at the time had to involve a great deal of consent from the women, a conclusion which affects how one sees today's women's movements.

The Red Tent exalts feeling, sensation and emotion as our validation in life. It ignores the centrality of faith in the religions it scorns. Since I see religion as primarily a way to practice faith, rather than a way to feel better, I could not give this work more than two stars.

Rating:
Summary: mixed bag
Review: I picked up the book and could barely stop reading it. I could not help it but to be under the spell of feeling as if I knew the women who were supposed to be Judiasm's "first women." I was close to choked up by the end of the book. Imagine, not being able to name your own child or have final say in the upbringing of the child. I was facinated by some of the comments about Laban, who I had already made guess as to being a child molester, as being so outrightly stated as such. How did all of his daughters "know" this was more than just degrading and unpleasant, or did they? Which leads me to making the one negative comment that I must make. That is, why did these women continue on in their idolotry anyway? Why, that is, did the author write it that way? The personalities are mostly well drawn but there are some bugs in the stew.

Rating:
Summary: a human, not a divine story
Review: Diamant has used the 34th chapter of Genesis as the setting for her story "The Red Tent." That the story is based upon characters in the Bible may distress some readers. Much of the story is drawn from the short description of Dinah and her family, in the book of Genesis, but the work is decidedly fictional. She does a wonderful job of breathing life into her characters and provides intricate detail about the sights, smells, and daily routines of a time and place so remote to most of our experiences, that they cannot help but be fictional. Many of the details that she provides are what brings the story to life and gives dimensionality to the characters. Whether they are historically accurate is unknowable, and for many readers, irrelevant. Her characterizations of the males in the story are shallow, but perhaps she does so because it is a story about the lives of women in a time when they had little contact with the realities of men. Through her inattention to their characterological development, she illustrates what she apparently feels are the complexities and values of a society of women whose lives occur only tangentially to those of men. Her attention to the small details of these womens' lives gives her characters dignity and a voice that is rarely heard in a literary tradition that values accomplishment and independence in women. Her writing style is quiet. She is gentle and nonjudgemental in her descriptions of people and events, and portrays her characters and situations with a complexity that reveals much emotional and psychological depth. I found the story to be touching and honest, and I was truly sad when it was over. This book would not be a good choice, however, for people who might be offended by her scriptural or historical liberties.

Rating:
Summary: Dinah Does the Euphrates
Review: Before launching into one of my tiresome "reviews", I must admit that I bought this book, along with Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, because I share a name with the main protagonist. Shallow? You bet your bookmarks.

However, my on-line book group was scheduled for a discussion of The Red Tent, hence giving me one more reason to spend 20 bucks I didn't have.

Notwithstanding my appalling ignorance of all things Biblical, despite my rabidly Catholic upbringing (I wanted to be a disco nun), I know nothing beyond the book aside from Diamant's skill as a writer and the resounding voice she lent Dinah. She not only creates a compelling woman out of the cardboard woman we meet in the Old Testament, but brought to life a cast of women worthy of the many uninteresting male figures who overshadow them in the big book.

One complaint: The story turns too far into the lives of those outside of Dinah's family - her mothers recede into the background. Because of this, Diamant digresses into what is largely uninteresting, at the expense of the interesting.
I wanted to know more of the two-dimensional Jacob, whom I like to call Milksop in Sandals, and Shalem the Stallion, Dinah's first hubby.

But who the hell cares, read the book. It's good enough, and her name is Dinah. Dee-nah.

Rating:
Summary: The Red Tent
Review: This book was slooooooooooooooow! It is 321 pages long and it took to page 205 to even get slighltly interesting. It was very difficult to read this book as a christian. It departs so far from the Bible. If you don't know the characters in the story from the Bible well, you will be very misled! I understood that the book was fictional but why change Bible facts around? It was fine for the author to write about Dinah anything she wanted because she really isn't expounded upon in the Bible but for the author to make Rebecca into some high priestess was going abit far.

Aside from changing the Bible truths all around the story was rather sad. The main character Dinah lives a miserable life and in the end she isn't even remembered by her father or brothers which she grew up with.

I don't think I'll read anymore books based loosely on the Bible.

Rating:
Summary: Simply an astoundingly brilliant and beautiful book.
Review: As one who has studied Bible from both Jewish and Christian perspectives for many years, I can quite calmly and quietly assure the author's critics that she has indeed done a superb job reading, interpreting, and extrapolating the Bible to create this marvelous novel. Those crucial points of change in any culture and especially in this one, both so familiar and so wondrously strange to 21st century readers, and particularly the gradual move from matriachy to patriachy are endless fascinating. Ms. Diamant paints very humanely her ancient women and men and her conjecture as to what may have actually happened to Dinah and her family are likely close to the mark. The shared intimacy and consorority of these women is awesome and something we so lack today. Oh, the numerous scenes involving human sexuality are hot and raw, but never obscene. Please more and soon, Ms. Diamant. Truly a virtuoso effort!