Sotah: A Novel
By Naomi Ragen
5/5
()
About this ebook
Beautiful, fragile Dina Reich, a young woman in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox haredi enclave, stands accused of the community's most unforgivable sin: adultery. Raised with her sisters to be an obedient daughter and a dutiful wife, Dina secretly yearned for the knowledge, romance, and excitement that she knew her circumscribed life would never satisfy. When her first romance is tragically thwarted, she willingly enters into an arranged marriage with a loving but painfully quiet man. Dina's deeply repressed passions become impossible to ignore, finding a dangerous outlet in a sudden and intense obsession with a married man, with terrible consequences. Exiled to New York City, Dina meets Joan, a modern secular woman who challenges all she knows of the world and herself.
Set against the exotic backdrop of Jerusalem's glistening white stones and ancient rituals, Sotah is a contemporary story of the struggle to reconcile tradition with freedom, and faith with love.
Naomi Ragen
Naomi Ragen is an award-winning novelist, journalist and playwright. Her first book, Jephte’s Daughter, was listed among the one-hundred most important Jewish books of all time. Her bestselling novels include Sotah, The Covenant, The Sisters Weiss, and Devil in Jerusalem. An outspoken advocate for women’s rights, and an active combatant against anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda through her website, she has lived in Jerusalem since 1971. An Observant Wife is her thirteenth novel.
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Reviews for Sotah
5 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Loved this book, I was intrigued from the beginning and could not stop
Reading it to find out what happened to each of the sisters. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An exceptional story about an ultra-orthodox Israeli girl trying to escape the confines of her religious beliefs. It is a very engaging and interesting story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Naomi Ragen's descriptions of "ultra-orthodox" Jewish life in Jerusalem manages not only to be respectful, but shows the lifestyle in a positive light so that it's at least possible for the reader to understand how someone born into this world would think it (for lack of a better term) sane. At the same time, she doesn't shy away from its dark underside either, so when we follow the sisters' progress through this hard life, we are also introduced to the status- and money-hunters, the violent Modesty Patrols, and the absolute lack of privacy. For someone like myself, who lives somewhere on the liberal side of liberal (and whose visit - yes, modestly dressed - to Meah Shearim was borderline traumatic), it's a strange, strange world, and I'm impressed with how Ragen manages to make it slightly, if not totally, comprehensible for me. It's not just a view into a normally closed world, it's a real page-turner; at no point does Ragen let her story idle - there are too many interesting people, too many interesting plot-twists, and far too many philosophical and religious ponderings for that.