The Red Tent

by Anita Diamant

I'm writing this months later... I set up a draft to remind myself that I read it, but then it was left in my office and I didn't have a moment. And so, now I'm missing the fresh recollections that I had then. But better late than never, right?

Anyway, this was a great book. Inspired me to reread the story of Jacob, Isaac, Leah, Rachel, Esau and Dinah from the first place I heard it. It's a retelling of the biblical story from the women's perspective. Maybe it's a modern perspective that people today have some of the same needs and hopes and fears that they did 5,000 years ago, maybe it's something that we just forget from time to time. It's another book about families as a village, and about how even within families there are rips and tears and healing. Loving more and less, and loving differently as well. It's a story about devotion, to each other and ideas. There are more passages, probably better passages, and certainly more representative passages than the one below. But this is the one that I like right now.

"I can still feel how my mothers loved me. I have cherished their love always. It sustained me. It kept me alive. Even after I left them, and even now, so long after their deaths, I am comforted by their memory.
I carried my mothers' tales into the next generation, but the stories of my life were forbiddend to me, ad that silence nearly killed the heart in me... And now you come to me - woment with hands and feet as soft as a queen's, with more cooking pots than you need, so safe in childbed and 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.
I wish I had more to tell of my grandmothers. It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing.
I am so grateful that you have come. I will pour out everything inside me so you may leave this table satisfied and fortified. Blessings on your eyes. Blessings on your children. Blessings on the ground beneath you. My heart is a ladle of sweet water, brimming over."