The Book of Longings

The opening section defines the limits Jewish women face. The section juxtaposes three women to suggest the powerlessness of women and the risk they take in voicing their own ideas. Ana is by her own admission a misfit. She refuses to follow the expectations of young Jewish girls. Her father, who, until Ana reaches marriageable age, supports his daughter’s love of reading and writing, sees his misfit child as a blessing. He provides Ana with tutors to develop her passion and provides her papyrus and ink. “When he couldn’t subdue [my aspirations], he made light of them. He liked to say the only boy in the family was a girl” (6). Within the father’s joke, however, is the quandary into which young Ana grows: Her love of writing, her need to express her voice, runs counter to long-standing Judaic traditions. Men, not women, studied and wrote; men, not women, gave voice to experience and, in turn, shaped and defined the Jewish culture and Jewish history. As Ana recalls, her father joked that “while God was busy knitting me together in my mother’s womb, he’d become distracted and mistakenly endowed me with gifts destined for some poor baby boy” (6).

That Ana aspires to write is a kind of family secret until Ana reaches the age of maturity and must conform to Jewish tradition that sees women as either beautiful ornaments or as domestic engineers. Ana, by contrast, is a misfit, a “disturbance of nature” (6). Her relationships in this opening section with her free-thinking, nonconformist Aunt Yaltha and with her only friend, the beautiful and gifted Tabitha, reveal to her that her aspirations to write are anything but a joke and that her dream of expressing her voice is anything but trivial.

It is Yaltha who reveals to her niece a part of her life tragedy, which Ana does not know. Yaltha has always been a part of Ana’s young life, encouraging her to write and eagerly listening to what Ana creates. Only with the advent of Ana’s betrothal, however, does Yaltha hint at her own tragedy, how she entered into a loveless marriage to an abusive man who cruelly blamed her for two miscarriages. In turn, when the man dies suddenly, neighbors accuse Yaltha without evidence of poisoning him. She is helpless against such attacks. Women were assumed guilty; Yaltha was therefore exiled from her home and sent to live first in a commune outside Alexandria and ultimately with her brother in Sepphoris. Her difficult life reveals to young Ana the very real implications of the arranged marriage she faces with the decrepit Nathaniel, and it reveals how women were subdued, used as a commodity, and ultimately silenced. Although much of Yaltha’s story will come later, including the heartbreaking separation from her only daughter, for now Ana sees the chilling reality of women in a culture that views women as good for only two things: “beauty and procreation” (22).

Tabitha’s story in the first section is a shocking revelation of the cost women pay for speaking their mind openly and honestly. Tabitha’s talent is her voice. Her singing is a rapturous delight. She has accepted her parents’ negotiation of her into a marriage with a much older man she has barely met. It is her singing that gives her release, that frees her soul. But when a Roman guard rapes her, Tabitha will not be silent. She goes to the marketplace and loudly and angrily decries the man, accusing him of the attack. Not even her own family believes her. To speak her mind, even in such honesty, in such a bald and terrified act of victimhood, is to violate the culture’s proscription against any form of female expression. Rather than finding sympathy or even the hope of justice, Tabitha faces public condemnation as a harlot and a liar. For Ana, however, the cutting out of Tabitha’s tongue by Tabitha’s own father is a deep and abiding shock. It is the introduction to her of the cost of a woman expressing her voice. This act renders Tabitha literally voiceless. She cannot form words, her mouth bloodied and bandaged. Speaking her mind, creatively giving voice to her heart and soul, is now seen as a real threat. Women were to be silent or face silencing. Tabitha enters the narrative as a slightly fanciful lighthearted and free spirit. The agony of her treatment, which foreshadows the torture and silencing of Jesus, marks Ana’s transition from carefree child into an even more dangerous misfit, a radical inevitably defined as a threat to her family, her society, and her culture.

If the opening section uses the stories of Yaltha and Tabitha to reveal to an unsuspecting and naïve Ana the threat under which she lives as a free spirit, a woman, and an artist, the introduction of the figure of Jesus Christ points her to a way out, a way to transcend the limits of her culture. The attraction she feels for the stranger in the Sepphoris marketplace is not merely the standard physical attraction typical of love-at-first-sight, although Ana likes the young man’s strapping arm muscles and his long, tangled hair. Ana, as a young woman first feeling the urgency of sexuality, even feels a ripple in her thighs long after their first meeting in the marketplace. What Jesus offers when Ana stumbles is his kindness and generosity of spirit in the courageous defiance of the cluster of Roman soldiers who fear Jesus helping the daughter of one of Herod’s most prominent courtiers as a threat to her safety. In this opening section, Kidd defines Jesus first by his own resistance to the stereotype of a Jewish man. Yes, he is macho in his work, lifting and working huge slabs of stone. But he is also gentle, soft spoken, and caring. There is no reason he should risk his own employment by rushing to help Ana when she falls. But he does. When later Ana, unable to forget the eyes of the man in the marketplace, meets Jesus outside of town where Ana has gone to find a place to bury her writings against their destruction by her own mother, Ana overhears Jesus lamenting the death of his father. It is a forceful reminder for Ana of the devotion and love of a family, ironic given her own father’s hand in arranging her marriage and her mother’s attacks on her scrolls. Love is a lesson Jesus will teach Ana. As this section ends, however, Ana sees no way out of her fast-approaching marriage save an act of God.