I recently received the Fall issue of Lilith Magazine, and was delighted to find that my new novel was the first book reviewed in that section [p.38]. I tend not to write long blog posts, but the review by Ilana Kurshan is so wonderful that I'm quoting the whole thing here, especially since Lilith Magazine does not have an online edition.
Towards the end of Rav Hisda’s Daughter, Maggie Anton’s eponymous heroine returns to her home in Babylon after four long years in the land of Israel and is greeted by her father with the words, “Blessed are You, Adonai…. Who revives the dead.” Anton has made quite a career out of reviving the dead, first with her trilogy of novels bringing to life Rashi’s three daughters, and now with her imaginative tale of the daughter of the third-century Talmudic sage Rav Hisda.
The novel’s opening scene is closely based on the Talmudic story in which Rav Hisda’s young daughter sits on her father’s lap while his two leading students stand before him. Rav Hisda asks his daughter which one of them she would like to marry, and she greedily responds, “both of them.” One of the students—arguably the more quick-witted—immediately pipes up, “I’ll go second!” This story sets the stage for Anton’s tale, in which Hisdadukh—Anton invents her name, which is Persian for “Daughter of Hisda”—is betrothed first to Rami bar Chama, the love of her youth and the father of her two children. Following Rami’s tragic and sudden death after just five years of marriage, Hisda is betrothed to the other student, the harsh and hardened Rava. The novel follows Hisdadukh not just from one husband to another, but also from her home in the Babylonia, where she is one of two daughters and seven sons in an illustrious rabbinic family, to the Galilee, where she mingles with amulet scribes, early Christians, and the great scholars of Tiberias, Caesaria, and Sepphoris. It is in Sepphoris that Anton imagines that Hisdadukh serves as the model for the iconic “Mona Lisa of Galilee,” a floor mosaic that remains a popular archeological attraction in Israel today.
Many of the conversations and characters in this novel are lifted straight of the pages of the Talmud. But as the Talmud is not a work of history—Anton may be the first to call it “historical fiction”—even these elements of the novel may raise eyebrows: “Everyone knew that the Evil Eye was responsible for a great deal of misery in the world. Rav, Father’s teacher, once went to a cemetery and cast a spell that let him talk to the dead. Ninety-nine told him they’d died from the Evil Eye and only one from bad air.” We must be as skeptical of the historicity of Anton’s account as we are of the Talmud’s narration of this incident in tractate Bava Metzia. And so in terms of authenticity, perhaps Rav Hisda’s Daughter has an advantage over Rashi’s Daughters, since there is no pretense that the former is based on historical sources. When Anton succeeds best, she brings Talmudic debates to life by showing the very human personalities and passions behind the various legal positions. And so when Rami and Rava debate the laws of inheritance, Anton suggests that they are in fact really fighting over Hisdadukh; thus their battle of wits is also a sort of romantic duel.
Anton’s novel is rooted not just in the soil of the Talmudic text but also in the field of academic Talmud study today, which is apparent even without glancing at her impressive bibliography or the list of illustrious international scholars she acknowledges. Hisdadukh is a student of Torah arguably modeled on her Palestinian counterpart Beruria, but she is also an enchantress who makes magical incantation bowls of the sort discovered by archeologists in the area that is now Iraq and Iran. The discussions that come alive in this book are Talmudic as well as academic, which may explain why this novel will have so much appeal for readers like myself who are steeped in the Talmudic text and the scholarship about its context. For readers who do not experience the pleasure of the familiar in its fictionalized form, Anton’s novel celebrates our rich and colorful textual heritage and reminds us that feminist history is often a return to the material and the real – to the beer the scholars drank, the springs in which they bathed, the cycle of blood that dictated their most intimate relationships, and the rooms in which they studied texts that occasionally refer to wives and daughters whose lives we can at best imagine.
Recently I was reminded that everyone should google themselves occasionally to make sure what appears about them on the web is both accurate and not inflammatory. Since I hadn’t done this in at least a year, I promptly searched for “Maggie Anton,” only to discover that there were 30,100 results. So much for seeing if they are accurate or inflammatory, or not.
When I googled “Rav Hisda’s Daughter,” I found something new: 40 ‘personal’ results and 25,300 ‘other’ results. Another search told me that “personal results” are from my Google+ posts, and not necessary available to the public. Again, too many to check accuracy or flammability. One good thing was seeing that my own websites appeared among the top ten.
Last, I googled my married name, which is different from my nom- de-plume [those who know, know]. I’ve tried to keep it private, which is why I’m not writing it here and thus making it searchable online via my blog. And judging from the dearth of Google results, none of which was for me personally, I appear to have succeeded.
Just when I was congratulating myself on my seeming anonymity, I came across this link to Amazon books. Amazingly, there were the two pamphlets I prepared on five generations of my husband’s parents’ ancestry, when I got sucked into the genealogy craze in the wake of the popularity of the TV miniseries “Roots” over 30 years ago. In hindsight, these were the forerunners of “Rashi’s Daughters,” because I didn’t just list the typical genealogy fixtures like names, dates, family members, etc. Using census, military, and local records, I researched the times and places they lived and constructed a story to explain what life would have been like for them.
How the devil Amazon found them is a mystery to me, although I did send copies to the LDS genealogy library in Salt Lake City. My husband scanned his into pdf files, so if anyone wants one, just ask and I’ll email them to you.
Starting November 8, I will be teaching a 3-session beginner’s Talmud class at Sinai Temple in Westwood. We will be studying the origin and laws of Hanukah from Shabbat 21b-23b using the new Koren Talmud iPad app. Talk about combining old and new!
I would like the class to read a little about the Talmud in advance - what is it, how/where/when/why it was created - so we can jump right into the text. Thus I searched the internet for some websites to recommend. To my surprise, and irritation, there are plenty of websites that purport to define Talmud, but quite a few are Christian or who-knows-what antisemetic group that actually want to discredit it. Students should be sure to check neutral [i.e. Wikipedia] or Jewish [i.e. My Jewish Learning] sources. I used Talmud scholar Jacob Neusner’s description from my website. Here's a cute animated video from Chabad that is both short and easy to understand; just ignore that the ancient Babylonian rabbis are wearing shtreimel-like hats when they should be wearing turbans.
Here’s another article, this one from the Jerusalem Post, about the increasing number of women studying Talmud, particularly in Israel. It has one of the most succinct and understandable descriptions of Talmud I’ve seen.
“Talmud is a central part of the character of rabbinic Judaism, containing as it does the canonization of an oral tradition believed to have been received in tandem with the Pentateuch at Mount Sinai and only written down and formalized following the destruction of the second Jewish commonwealth by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago. The work, which is approximately the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica, comprises canonical Jewish thought on issues ranging from torts to sacrifices, etiquette and protocol, and metaphysics and moral philosophy.”
Since we only live a few blocks from where Endeavour was exiting LAX this morning, I made the wild decision to spend 3 hours in the middle of the night waiting for her with hundreds of similarly crazed folks on Westchester Pkwy. While I'm not crazy about the music, the video pretty much shows what I waited for between midnight and 3 am. Note that the motion is speeded up [see how fast the people are walking]; the shuttle was moving really slowly.
Personally, I would have used "She'll be Coming Around the Mountain" or "Something's Coming" [from Westside Story] as the soundtrack.
Jewish Holidays have kept me busy, but with no speaking gigs since Sept 14, I’ve used my free time to start writing the second volume of RAV HISDA’S DAUGHTER. By no means do I consider myself an expert historical novelist, so it was great to learn about an article in Publisher’s Weekly by Mary Sharratt, detailing her Five Tips for writing historical fiction.
To summarize: 1] Research comes before writing, 2] Inhabit the mind and skin of your characters, 3] Language has to match the setting, 4] Do explore real historical events and people, and 5] Don’t over-rely on historical celebrities.
Clearly I do better at 1, 4 and 5 [no Tudors in my tales], while I find doing 2 and 3 well more of a challenge.
I also came across a wonderful description by Don Maker of what’s so great about historical novels. “The primary reason for reading any literature is enjoyment. Well-written historical fiction gives you all of the advantages of any other genre of fiction – conflict, passion, and great perceptions about the human experience – but with added advantages. Obviously, you get insights into both history and the culture of various eras and societies. You might gain some knowledge of early politics, art, technology, religion and philosophy, and so on. But the best thing is that all of this information your brain is gathering while you enjoy the story is that everything is real. Well, in many cases as ‘real’ as good research and a faithful reproduction can make it. Those conflicts, those passions, those human experiences, all actually happened to people to some greater or lesser extent. Without leaving your comfortable living room, you get to travel back in time and relive the great people and events that make our world what it is today.”