The Red Tent

Read this when my child was about a year old, and rereading it again now.

Also made into a miniseries this is a book about Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob (from the bible) and Leah. The story chalks her journey from a child to her demise, a footnote in the bible but brought to life by Diamant’s imagery and detail. The story starts with her life in the nomadic realm of Jacob and her understanding of her ‘place’ in the larger scheme of men-focused lives. The red tent (if you haven’t made the connect, the menstrual tent) is where the women (four wives of Jacob) work, gossip, balance equations with each other and support the men. Dinah falls in love and marries an Egyptian prince who is murdered by her brothers as he is not of the same religion. She escapes only to return much later with her son.

The bible’s version is different than Diamant’s in many many ways. The book was written in 1997, one of the earliest ones in the genre of historical fiction.

Her writing style is of a storyteller and for all of us who have seen different versions of the ‘menstrual tent’ in our lives, this resonates. My grandmother embroidered her heart out and created one of the most beautiful trousseaus for my mother. I still have a couple. For the women I knew it was a time to heal and get off the wheel of running and managing large households.