The Red Tent by Diamant In Diamant’s powerful novel The Red Tent the ever-silent Dinah from the 34th chapter of Gensis is finally given her own voice, and the story she tells is a much different one than expected. With the guiding hands of her four “mothers”, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah, all the wives of Jacob, we grow with Dinah from her childhood in Mesoptamia through puberty, where she is then entered into the “red tent”, and well off into her adulthood from Cannan to Egypt. Throughout
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant The author and her times Anita Diamant, author of the historic fiction novel, The Red Tent, is a devout Jewish-American living in Newtonville, Massachusetts with her husband and daughter, Emilia. She has written five books about contemporary Jewish life, The Red Tent being her first novel. Diamant may have been influenced by the recent resurgence of creating Midrashim, or stories that attempt to explain the Torah by examining its subtexts. Modern women have
In her book, The Red Tent, Anita Diamant attempts to expound upon the foundations laid by the Torah by way of midrashim. In doing so, parts of her stories tend to stray from the original biblical text. The following essay will explore this and several other aspects of the book as they relate to the Torah and modern midrash. One of the first differences I recognized was the description of Leah’s eyes. In Genesis 29:17, Leah’s eyes are described as weak. Diamant dispels this ‘rumor’, saying that Leah’s
interestingly, of Dinah. Anita Diamant, a contemporary chronicler of Jewish lore and a seminal figure in modern-day historical fiction, expressed the woes and voicelessness experienced by the women of the Old Testament in her novelistic midrash entitled The Red Tent. Narrated from Dinah's perspective, Diamant's novel presents a feministic interpretation and retelling of the story of Dinah, her mothers, and her sisters. Dinah's life in the Book of Genesis is relegated to just a few ambiguous sentences, since
they want. The Bible, demonstrates the typical women and how there’s the beginning of women breaking out there shell, which would be considered as disrespectful in the past but, would be tolerated in the twenty first century. On the other hand, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant illustrates the master mind of women shifting the stigma and breaking the norms of being voiceless. Anita Diamant reveals how the bible would have been written by a women, and in the perspective of a voiceless person in the bible
The Red Tent - An Unforgettable Testimony to Women’s Strength and Power The Red Tent by Anita Diamant illuminates one of the greatest testimonies to women’s strength: childbirth. On a creative level, Diamant did something extraordinary. She took a small passage from the Bible about the character Dinah, and made her story into an unforgettable testimony to women’s strength and power. Overlooking women’s role in Biblical life is easy because there is practically nothing written by or about women
escape from a difficult situation. Liberation is equality, a release from real and figurative imprisonment, and a strong mental and spiritual change in mindset (Merriam-Webster 1). Characters like Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye and Dinah in The Red Tent experience tremendous liberation from their devastating situations when they manage to find true happiness. Portrayed as a battered and abused girl in Toni Morrison’s novel, Pecola Breedlove lives a life of confusion, racism, resentment, and hostility
Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent is a Midrash revolved around the biblical passage of Genesis 34: Dinah and the Shechemites. In this story Anita Diamant gives a voice to Simeon and Levi’s sister, Dinah, who is known as the woman who was raped then later loved by Shechem. After Shechem’s injustice of Dinah, Shechem and his city were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. Both bible passages and the novel The Red Tent provide some similar and some different characteristic traits for Simeon and Levi which
The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides insight to the story of a Pakstani immigrant who comes to America pre and post 9/11. Changez has a tendency to waver between indentifying himself has Pakistani or American, discuss how Changez’s sense of identity changes throughout the novel? From the beginning of the novel or technically his retelling of his account Changez is respectful and admires both Pakistan and America. Throughout his experience at Princeton, Changez would put on airs about who he was
What does it mean to be Jewish or Muslim, or even Christian? What does an understanding of the history that intertwines faith and culture matter to how we live within those religious labels? The Red Tent and Stranger to History, while both using a different perspective, explores the connection between history, culture, and faith traditions, and how we must look at the past to understand our own present and future. Religious experience is distinctly different for women than it is for men, which is
Childhood Dreams, Adult Nightmares In the book The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, the character Dinah is given a new life, and becomes more than the side note that she is in the Bible. The book starts with Dinah the memories of her mother and aunts, which are stories that have been passed down to her. Throughout the book it becomes clear that the stories and memories of the women in her family have a strong impact on Dinah, and it seems as though she expects her life to follow in a similar path to the
to camp and food and sleep. I get to the pond’s edge, across from the point where my tent sits. There are no trails and the boreal forest is thick with scrub pine and dead-fall. Early afternoon sun brings out the wave of deer flies; I shake my head so that my two braids might hit the little buggers in mid-air. Undeterred, one begins to chew on my shoulder blade and prickers dig into my shins. I can see my tent across the pond, 100 yards as the crow flies, probably a mile walk around the edge. I
become more friendly than savage. After bucks horrible trip to a place much different from his home, he has to “learn the ropes” of his new world, and conform to its rules. On his journey the Yukon Buck is stopped in Seattle where he meets a man in a red sweater that taught him the first rope, “The law of the club”; which teaches Buck to obey and fea...
understand what I am talking about. As an example, it is not uncommon to walk into the living room and find an old ragged sheet or quilt stretched across a couple of chairs-this serves as his tent. This is the exact time some people decide to come by to see us. As the visitors come in, I hurriedly snatch the tent down, but immediately wish that I hadn't for under it are Chewbacca, Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, C3PO. And R2D2. Trying nonchalantly to push these Star Wars creatures aside with my bare foot
greedy and didn't suit our playing qualifications by continuously changing rules and cheating. It was rare that we encountered them anyhow, and that suited us fine. Most of the time we would stay the whole weekend. Our parent's elected to sleep in a tent, while my brother and I slept in one of the many cozy bedrooms of the farmhouse. We loved it there and secretly both he and I wished that we could stay forever. There were separate reasons why we loved it there. My brother, Forest, had a choice
Our Camping Trip I awoke to the sun piercing through the screen of my tent while stretching my arms out wide to nudge my friend Alicia to wake up. “Finally!” I said to Alicia, the countdown is over. As I unzip the screen door and we climb out of our tent, I’m embraced with the aroma of campfire burritos that Alicia’s mom Nancy was preparing for us on her humungous skillet. While we wait for our breakfast to be finished, me and Alicia, as we do every morning, head to the front convenient store for
I awoke to the sun piercing through the screen of my tent while stretching my arms out wide to nudge my friend Alicia to wake up. “Finally!” I said to Alicia, the countdown is over. As I unzip the screen door and we climb out of our tent, I’m embraced with the aroma of campfire burritos that Alicia’s mom Nancy was preparing for us on her gargantuan skillet. While we wait for our breakfast to be finished, me and Alicia, as we do every morning, head to the front convenient store for our morning french
My Time in the Boundary Waters I love camping and spending time outside, but this summer I had a completely new experience when I visited the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Before leaving, I had very little knowledge of the Boundary Waters. After getting advice from friends and purchasing some special equipment, I realized that camping there was going to be much more complicated than I had thought. I was dropped off at my good friend Siri’s house, where I met the rest of the people going on the trip
was our place, and anyone we brought up there was our guest. Now, my family could never really be considered in the Grizzly Addams-class with respect to the outdoors. That is to say, our adventures to the wilderness always included at least one tent, three weeks’ supply of food (for a week-long trip), a gas barbecue, radios, bicycles, and a moped, and one year we even took a small house-trailer with a privy and a sink. Purists and naturalists would call it “car camping” with a derisive snort,
clear stream. My brothers and I would always throw rocks and sticks into the river. We loved to watch the huge fish jump far above the water, and dive back in head first. We never stayed in a tent because of all the moisture that the river would give off. In the mornings, when we did stay in the tent, my family and I would wake up feeling drenched with water. We had a new camp trailer that was big enough to fit five people. The trailer was white with a maroon stripe going down the side. It had