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Overview
Beautiful, blonde, materialistic Delilah Levy steps into a life she could have never imagined when in a moment of panic she decides to marry a sincere Rabbinical student. But the reality of becoming a paragon of virtue for a demanding and hypocritical congregation at an Orthodox synagogue in the suburbs leads sexy Delilah into a vortex of shocking choices which spiral out of control into a catastrophe which is as sadly believable as it is wildly amusing.
Told with immense warmth, fascinating insight, and wicked humor, The Saturday Wife depicts the pitched and often losing battle of all of us as we struggle to hold on to our faith and our values amid the often delicious temptations of the modern world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312352394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2008 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 461,615 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Saturday Wife
By Ragen, Naomi
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2007 Ragen, NaomiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312352387
Chapter One The thing people never understood about Delilah was that she always considered herself the victim of a painfully disadvantaged childhood, something that mystified her hardworking, upwardly mobile parents. There were few who knew how deeply she mourned her endless humiliations: winter clothes chosen from picked-over reduced racks in January sales instead of shiny new in autumn; a sweet sixteen celebrated in a bowling alley instead of in a hotel with a live band; Passover seders at home prepared by her sweating mother instead of in the dining room of exclusive resorts; summers lying on the public beach instead of trips to Israel and Europe. A childhood of last year’s Nikes, drugstore sunglasses, fifteen-dollar haircuts, and do-it-yourself French manicures whose white line was always crooked. . . . On the rare occasions that she sat in self-judgment, such as before the Yom Kippur fast, she never felt these longings marked her as selfish, materialistic, or shallow. On the contrary, she considered herself an idealist, someone focused on the really important things in life: true happiness, true love.
As she saw it, she was simply being honest with herself. And someone who “really loved her” would be the kind of person who would stop at nothing tohelp her overcome the trauma of her youth, her mother’s cheap fashion accessories—those fake pearls, those nine-karat gold amethyst rings. Someone who “really loved her” would understand and appreciate how profoundly she needed a house, not an apartment, preferably with a swimming pool, in addition to business-class jaunts to five-star resorts in the Caribbean and Hawaii. She felt this way despite all the best efforts of our synagogue and schooling to convince us of the fleeting worth of material things, as opposed to the eternal reward—in this life and the next—of spiritual attainments. In general, Delilah’s relationship to religion was somewhat complex. She wasn’t a natural rebel. She actually loved the elaborate meals, the dressing up for the synagogue, the socializing afterward. On the other hand, she absolutely refused to accept the fact that bearded rabbis had the right to decide for her how long her skirts and sleeves would be, what she could and couldn’t read, or watch on TV or in the movies, or what kind of dates she could have (i.e., serious ones, leading to early marriages, as opposed to frivolous recreational ones like riding roller coasters in Playland). Like most people, she snipped and tugged and restitched her religion to make it a more comfortable fit. She didn’t feel guilty about this. Why should she, she told herself, when the rabbis themselves had done a good deal of tailoring? Take the relationship between the sexes. On the one hand, the Bible taught that men and women were both created in God’s image as equals, but on the other, Jewish law was male chauvinist in the extreme, notwithstanding millennia of rabbinical apologetics to disprove the obvious. Men were the leaders, high priests, rabbis, judges. While rabbis claimed that they were simply expounding on eternal laws derived from God-given sacred texts, the laws always seemed to come out to the men’s advantage. For example, sitting shiva. During the seven days of mourning for a parent, wife, or child, rabbinical law said a man wasn’t permitted to do anything; he had to be served and taken care of. But if a woman was sitting shiva—surprise!—the same law said she was allowed to get up and wash the floor and cook dinner. Despite these feelings, Delilah never considered herself a feminist, refusing to join those of us who railed against being banned from donning a prayer shawl and phylacteries or from learning Talmud. She’d just roll her eyes and yawn. “That’s all I need. More religious obligations.” The biblical heroines she admired were not the tough, powerful matriarchs, but Esther, who’d soaked in precious bath oils for six months, mesmerizing the king and becoming queen of Persia; and Abigail, who sent war-weary King David camel-loads of food and drink, thereby giving her tightfisted husband, Nabal, a fatal heart attack, thus leaving herself rich and free to marry David, which she was only too happy to do.
To Delilah’s thinking, these were stories with a deeply spiritual message for women. Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir bored her. Equal wages were all right, but it was better if your husband earned enough so that you never, ever had to work if you didn’t want to. Truth be told, her vision of the perfect world would have been a party in Gone with the Wind where women wore ball gowns to barbecues and men brought them plates of delicious food; a place where all women had to do was smile and be pretty and men fell all over themselves to please and amuse them. All through high school, Delilah was in training for this role. If only you could have seen her then: those manicured toenails with the red polish so carefully applied, those tanned slim thighs, the blond hair braided in cornrows with turquoise beads, the tiny bathing suit like two slashes of color, the eyes that flashed at you like tanzanite, deep blue flecked with gold. She was so deliciously slim, so adorably sexy, it made you stop and stare, the way one stares at a flashy lightning storm or a gaudy tropical sunset. And she knew it. How could she not? Men and boys flocked around her, and she giggled and flirted indiscriminately with all of them, even the young Puerto Rican janitors hired to clean the floors and bathrooms of the Hebrew Academy of Cedar Heights. “Everyone does exactly as they please,” she’d say cryptically, tossing her head. “Even the ones who parade around showing off their holiness with all those head coverings and fringed garments, yarmulkes and wigs. Secretly, they also do exactly what they want and find excuses afterward.” When we protested mildly, she told us to grow up. While we had all more or less decided by the end of high school what we wanted to be, Delilah remained vague. Her mother wanted her to take some education courses and become a teacher. But something as small and unimaginative as that wouldn’t suit her at all, she said. Besides, she didn’t like the outfits or the hair and makeup that went with it. You couldn’t get away with much in front of a class full of yeshiva kids with a rabbi/principal peeking in on you every few hours. And what if the kids asked you questions, let’s say, about the Resurrection of the Dead? Or if the Messiah was coming? She knew she was supposed to believe with perfect faith, but honestly, she had never been able to get her head around such ideas. What, would they come out of their graves, like in The Night of the Living Dead? Or like that mangled factory-worker who comes knocking on his parents’ door in The Monkey’s Curse? And this Messiah. Did he know he was the Messiah? A person is born, gets toilet trained, eats hamburgers, and then—what, finds out he’s going to bring peace to the world and change all human life as we know it?
Would it be like Moses and the burning bush, where you are just minding your own business trying to keep the sheep from falling off a cliff when God suddenly calls your name and gives you your assignment? But then, how could you tell it was true and you weren’t just another candidate for lithium? She could always be a public school teacher, she supposed. But everyone knew the Teachers’ Union stuck new teachers in hellholes in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, places where a white Jewish blonde getting into a new car was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. She tried to envision herself like Michelle Pfeiffer in that movie where she gets all the drug-addicted Puerto Ricans to become honor students because she’s so tough, but kind and she really, really believes in them. But she couldn’t imagine working in a public school and not wearing pants, which the rabbis absolutely forbade and which she still hadn’t figured a way around. Michelle could never have worked those miracles in a skirt with all that sitting up on the desk with her legs crossed. The decision to enroll at Bernstein Women’s College, affiliated with the well-known Bernstein Rabbinical College, had been made after long discussions with friends and counselors. Although the tuition was thousands of dollars a year and she could have gone to any city college for free, she was advised by all that she wouldn’t like city colleges. They were too big, too impersonal, full of public high school riffraff. There was no social life. The bottom line was she was afraid to venture out, despite her bravado, from the sheltered yeshiva day school environment she had known, to face the real world, where her new sophistication would be laughed at by hip young New Yorkers who slept together and indulged in drugs and all kinds of other perversions she could only just imagine with equal parts loathing and envy. But there was one thing you had to give Bernstein, the one true incontrovertible fact which made all those student loans a worthwhile investment: it was turning out to be one, long shidduch date. Everyone was a matchmaker: the girls, the teachers, the teacher’s cousins, the girls’ cousins. It was the official bride pool for Bernstein Rabbinical College as well as Yeshiva University, with its well-regarded medical and law school, a fact well-known to all the parents shouldering the burden of their daughters’ unjustified and outlandish tuition. Many of the girls were out-of-towners from tiny Jewish communities where available religious Jewish men were either under ten or over forty. Enrolling at Bernstein rescued them from horrible Young Israel weekends in Catskill hotels and being relentlessly pursued by the proverbial kosher butcher from Milwaukee: over thirty, overweight, and oversexed. Here, in a relaxed and respectable atmosphere, every Ruchie could find her Moishe.
And vice versa. The out-of-towners were usually the sheltered daughters of rabbis, pretty and sweet and innocent, with very little dating experience. Most of them had endured at least a year of long-distance courtships in which relatives and friends and professionals had found matches for them in places like Monsey, Brooklyn, or Baltimore. The dates arranged necessitated expensive cross-country plane trips, a situation that understandably left most of them languishing in solitary gloom on Saturday nights. When they moved into the dorms at Bernstein, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In contrast, the native New Yorkers, used to a plethora of possibilities, found the fix-ups from Bernstein and Yeshiva University left much to be desired. Most of the guys were short and pale and wore glasses. They showed up dressed like they were on their way to a Rabbinical Council of America convention. Moreover, most were victims of severe rabbinical brainwashing on the subject of physical contact with the opposite sex outside of marriage. The negiah, or “touching” laws, were basically one loud NO! NOT ANYPLACE, ANY TIME, ANY BODY PART, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! This left some of the young men severely challenged on this subject, making Delilah feel as if she had a rare communicable disease. Even the most adventurous managed little more than casually stretching an arm out onto the back of her subway seat. Gee, that was a thrill. Some, at least, had looked normal enough: a crocheted skullcap, a nice sweater over an open-collared shirt. There was one universal problem, though. Anyone willing to be fixed up was almost always someone who couldn’t find a date on his own. And for good reason. Delilah kept on going, though, always allowing herself to be persuaded by the hard or soft sell of the people who were setting her up, that this one “was different.” And why shouldn’t she trust them? After all, they had nothing to gain from making her miserable.
In fact, most of them were involved in matchmaking because they considered it a good deed. Indeed, there is a widely held belief among religious Jews that achieving three successful matches earns one a free entry pass to the best neighborhoods in the World to Come. The system in Bernstein worked this way: The guys would come into the dorm lobby and give their name and the name of the girl they were taking out to the housemother, who would then call up to the girl’s room, announcing him. The girl would then come down to the lobby and tell the housemother the name of the boy. Sometimes, seeing the girl who spoke his name, the boy would sit perfectly still until he could quietly slip out the front door. It was quite a show. When she had nothing better to do on a Saturday night, Delilah delighted in hanging around the lobby to watch. Which is how she got involved with Yitzie Polinsky. The boy was striking: tall and very slim, with broad shoulders and thick rock-star hair that fell adorably over his eyes. He wore a dark skullcap that melted right in and was hardly noticeable at all. His jeans were faded in all the right places, and to top it off he had on a black turtleneck and a kind of bomber jacket of brown leather. You could tell the housemother didn’t approve at all. But when he gave her his name, her eyes lit up: the son of the very famous Rabbi Menachem Polinsky of Crown Heights. The housemother pushed her reading glasses to the top of her gray wig, looked him over again, lips pursed, and then shrugged. Allowances had to be made. She called up to the girl. Delilah recognized her name: Penina Gwertzman, a cute little out-of-towner from Kansas or some other impossibly goyish place. Petite, with long dark hair and an ample figure, she was from a very religious family and had been carefully brought up. Yitzie wasn’t her type at all. He was Delilah’s type. She watched as Yitzie’s eyes took in Penina’s body in long, slow strokes. Satisfied, he smiled and got up, sauntering over to her, his hands in his pockets. The nearer he got, the more Penina tugged nervously at her long pleated skirt, as if willing it to grow a few more inches. Copyright © 2007 by Naomi Ragen. All rights reserved.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Saturday Wife by Ragen, Naomi Copyright © 2007 by Ragen, Naomi. Excerpted by permission.
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Reading Group Guide
The Boulders in the River: A Thousand Years of Women's Achievements
An Original Essay by the Author
If we are going to talk about the history of women, Jewish women, over the last thousand years, let's start with the tale of Gertrude B. Elion, who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for her work in medical research .
Born in New York City in 1918, to a long line of rabbis, Trudy spoke Yiddish at home. A good student, she was forced to attend a free city college when her father lost his money in the stock market crash of 1929 .
Although she majored in chemistry, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, she couldn't get the financial aid of an assistantship to continue her studies. Professors told her that a pretty young woman like herself would be a distracting influence in the labs. She enrolled in secretarial school instead, and worked seven years as a secretary to save the $450 she needed to attend graduate school. Working on her Master's Degree, she continued to work part-time as a receptionist in a doctor's office. In 1942, when male chemists were all drafted, she was hired by a British pharmaceutical company, Burroughs-Wellcome.
Within two years, her revolutionary work altered the way drugs are discovered. In a major breakthrough, she developed drugs that interfered with the development of abnormal cells leaving healthy cells alone. Attempting to earn her doctorate by attending school after work, her professors insisted she quit her job. She refused.. Because of her discoveries, today 80% of children with childhood leukemia survive. When Trudy began her work, half of all such children died within two or three months, and fewer than a third lived a year. Her work in the development of AZT, the main drug used to combat the AIDS virus, was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 1988. She never did get her Ph.D.
And one cannot help but wonder what would have happened, if Trudy Elion hadn't been able to type.
Over the last thousand years, the history of women in general, and Jewish women in particular, can be compared to a mighty river of talent, ability and creativity willfully dammed by huge boulders of prejudice, social and religious strictures. And yet, despite the choking impediments, a small trickle has still managed to flow around and through, reaching us in the form of cultural, literary and scientific achievements .
What all these women achievers seem to have in common is the ability to somehow free themselves from a male-dominated society by either never marrying, or though a fortunate birth which conferred on them by proxy the powerful, unique status held by noteworthy fathers or brothers .
Others, like Trudy Elion, rose above the barriers by simply sprouting wings and flying when their climb up the ladder of success was permanently blocked, achieving such spectacular successes that they became simply impossible to ignore. It is interesting that some of our earliest information about such women comes from the Talmud, that bastion of male intellectual hegemony .
Despite its own dictum that: "women are lightheaded," it is from the Talmud that we learn of Beruriah, the 2nd Century wife of Rabbi Meir, who actually corrected a misinterpretation of ritual law, and is thanked for it in the Talmud (Mesechta Kelim, Chapter 1).We learn of Yalta, Rabbi Rachman's wife, and the daughter of Rabbi Chanina ben Tardyon, who disagreed with her father on a point of law and her view is accepted (Tosephta Kelim). And from the Talmud Yerushalmi, Chagigah, 2:1 we discover that the daughter of Elisha Ben Avuyah refuted the arguments of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and forced him to admit this mistake.
One of the rishonim, Rabbi Eliezer of Mainz, praised his wife, saying:" Her mouth opens with wisdom and she is fluent in all the laws of issur v'heter and on Shabbat she sits and expounds the law…" Rav Shmuel HaLevi of Bagdad had an only daughter who was fluent in chumash and Talmud and would deliver lectures to men from behind a curtain.
The Maharshal reported that his grandmother, Rebbitzen Miriam, directed a yeshiva for many years . Also sitting behind a curtain, she would lecture advanced students. There is also Osnat, the only child of a rabbi in Kurdistan, who, in the 1500's, ran her own yeshiva.
In other cases, the unique conjunction of the particular needs of the age and personal cirucumstances opened up unique opportunities for women to reach prominence. In the sixteenth century, the terrors of the inquisition and the death of her husband, gave Portuguese converso, Dona Gracia Mendes, the opportunity and the power to use the vast wealth of her spice trading empire to spirit Jews out of the hands of the Inquisition. She bought land in Tiberias and her plan was to give the Jews of her time a place of refuge.
It is noteworthy that male historians have often tried to credit her achievements to her nephew, Don Joseph . However, archival material point clearly to Dona Gracia being the moving force through that moment in history.
Another unique opportunity for women came along after the death of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chassidim, whose void was filled by other charismatic leaders, some of them women. The most famous was Hannah Rachel, renowned as the "Maid of Ludomir." Her story is illustrative of the kind of pressures brought to bear on outstanding women to force them into a more stereotypical existence. Born in 1815, the only child of a prosperous merchant, Hannah had an ecstatic experience and thereafter began praying with tallith and teffilin. After her father's death, she said Kaddish for him and used her inheritance to build a Bet Medrash in which she delivered scholarly discourses. attended by thousands from all over Europe, including many prominent rabbis. Eventually, rabbis accused her of being possessed by the devil. To counter this, her friends urged her into a disastrous marriage which soon ended in divorce. After that, her influence declined and she soon left the country, becoming the first chassidic leader to settle in Israel.
In contrast, Sara Schnerir, founder of the Beit Yaakov school system, rose to prominence with the blessing of the rabbinical establishment. The idea of a school for religious girls was revolutionary in its day, a time when girls received no education at all or were sent to Christian schools. This was less than seventy years ago.
Born in 1883 in Cracow, Poland, Sara was the pious daughter of Belz Chassidim. Troubled that religious girls would not follow in the path of their pious fathers if they continued to be ignored, she asked the blessing of the Belzer Rebbe, the Rebbe of Ger, and the Chafetz Chaim, to turn her sewing workroom into the first religious school for girls. The leaders, reluctantly acknowledging that it was only fair to teach Jewish girls that which non-Jewish girls wishing to convert needed to know, i.e. laws, rituals, etc., gave her their blessing. At first, young women refused to attend, and she was forced to teach children. But by 1935 there were 248 Bet Yaakov schools in Poland alone, comprising 35,000 students. It is perhaps ironic that today Beth Jacob schools educate girls to marry early and bear many children. Sara Schnerir herself was divorced and childless.
A true pioneer in Torah study for men and women was Professor Nechama Leibowitz. Born in 1905 in Riga, Latvia, Nechama's father took the rare step of hiring private tutors to teach his daughter Hebrew and religious studies. Professor Leibowitz became the world's greatest teacher of the Bible, pioneering a completely unique method Biblical analysis and emphasizing the moral teachings and practical application of Biblical texts. She also popularized Torah study for the masses through her weekly bible sheets, beginning the program after giving a Bible class to vacationing women factory workers, who expressed a strong desire to continue studying when they went back to work.
Nevertheless, despite her unique achievements, when Rabbi Shlomo Riskin asked her to teach students in his yeshiva in 1987, he was condemned by haredi rabbis for inviting a woman to teach his students. Rav Ovadia Yosef actually proposed that Professor Leibowitz teach the class behind a curtain! Prof. Leibowitz taught the class, without curtains .
For some women, the ticket to greater accomplishment came with illness, or with immigration, both of which conferred on them a freedom from the strictures women suffered under normal circumstances. Writer Grace Aguilar's delicate health earned her private tutors, and the ability to devote her time to literature. She wrote seven books, both novels and non-fiction, and was considered a champion of the Jewish faith.
For writer Mary Antin, born in 1881 in Plotzk, Russia, the catalyst to freedom was immigration to America, where her strictly Orthodox family quickly Americanized and Mary benefited from public schooling. Attending Columbia University and Barnard College, she published the first American bestseller, "The Promised Land" which went into 34 printings and sold 85,000 copies.
Another Nobel Prize winner was Rosalyn S. Yalow, born in New York in 1921. She, like Trudy Elion, also graduated from Hunter College, but was awarded an assistantship and eventually received her Ph.D. Her revolutionary work with radioisotopes in medical research, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977. Nevertheless, her mother would always admonish her: "No self-respecting woman goes to work and leaves two small children at home with just a maid." Speaking to authors Bob and Elinor Slater for their 1994 book "Great Jewish Women," Ms. Yalow said:" If women are ever to move upwards, we must demonstrate competence, courage, and determination to succeed and must be prepared to challenge and take our place in the establishment."
These fleeting glimpses of the achievements of Jewish women over the last thousand years is remarkable more for what it tells us about what has been lost rather than gained. From these drops of accomplishments, we learn of the huge reservoir of ability and talent lost to the human race because of all the man-made dikes and breakwaters that hold it back, barriers which even today continue to interfere with women's ability to share their unique gifts.
The following is a case in point. Israeli filmmaker Elena Chaplin documented a remarkable haredi women's rock group called "Tofaaha," filming the women's lives as well as their performances. At every step, the women in the group encountered another obstacle. They needed to care for their children, one of which was severely handicapped. Another battled health problems. All of them were circumscribed by strict rabbinical decrees which dictated who they could perform for, what kind of material they could use, what clothes they could wear, and how they could advertise their show.
And always, there was the Catch 22, an unexpected rabbinical ruling that threw a wrench into the works at the last minute: A rabbi, who had originally given them a ruling permitting them to be filmed, suddenly told them that their mouths couldn't be filmed while they were singing. And so, they appear on screen with a large crayon scratch mark where their mouths should be. A little bigger, I thought, and the Rabbis will have achieved their ultimate goal: to erase these women completely .
And yet, despite it all, the women, bursting with musical skills, songwriting talent, remarkable voices, and amazing energy, lit up the screen .
It made me want to cry .© 2007 Orange County Jewish Life
1. The Saturday Wife has been described as a satire. Do you agree or disagree? If you agree, what is the author satirizing, and why?
2. Describe what you think would be the perfect ending for this book and why.
3. What do you think is the role of a good spiritual leader?
4. Describe the perfect spiritual leader for Swallow Lake.
5. Do you think Chaim failed the congregation, or did the congregation fail him?
6. In what way could Delilah be described as a comic figure? In what way a tragic one?
7. In her acknowledgements, the author says she was inspired by the book Madame Bovary. Can you find some parallels between the two books?
8. Do you think Delilah jumped over the edge, or was she pushed?
9. Describe the kind of life that would have really made Delilah happy.
10. If you had to write a sequel to this book, describe chapter one.
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