I'm ashamed to say I'm not sure I knew Dinah's name, before reading this.
I knew parts of her story, from my youth, when I heard the Bible tale. How the sons of Jacob tricked every adult male in a town to become circumcised, just so their king's son could be granted the privilege of marrying Jacob's daughter.
How they then slaughtered the town while the men were laid up healing.
In church, the story's presented as a righteous thing, a sign of their cleverness. How they could outsmart their enemies.
No one said anything about Dinah. How she might have felt about things. Or about the wives and daughters of the murdered men. They were background characters, unimportant to the morality of the tale.
So how amazing, then, that Diamant has put Dinah front and center. Breathed life into her, filling in her story and giving us a complete account of her journey. Of her mistakes and triumphs. Of her hopes and fears.
It's an incredible feat to pull off. And Diamant covers not just Dinah's life, but her mothers' lives, too, starting from the moment they met Jacob, so we get the fullest picture possible of Dinah's situation, of her time and place.
She gives us a sense of the rhythms of their existence, both day-to-day and year to year, without ever getting bogged down in too many details (or leaving things so vague as to be unhelpful).
And what rhythms! Diamant invokes the feel of the ancient world, the sounds and the smells, the hassles and the joys. And it's a woman's world that she brings to life, the rituals of childbirth and the red tent, the offerings to multiple gods, the hard work of cooking and farming and making, well, everything. T
he men are present, but it's not their story. It's not their world.
Diamant's succeeded so well in showing us this world, in fact, that it's her story, Dinah's story, that I remember more vividly now, not the ones about her brothers. Which feels...proper. The way it should be.
Better to remember the healer and midwife, perhaps, than the tricksters and killers.
