Eva Etzioni-Halevy’s Aggrieved Women of the Bible

Austrian-born Eva Etzioni-Halevy hid from the Germans as a small child and then emigrated with her family to Palestine after the war. She’s turned to fiction writing after a long career as a sociologist; for her first novel, The Song of Hannah, she draws inspiration from the Bible and the unusual family described in the First Book of Samuel. (If this was Heeb, I’d probably be calling this “Samuel Has Two Mommies,” but not because it has anything to do with that–where do you people get these ideas?) Hannah’s gone from the original story by the second chapter, and Etzioni-Halevy’s other female protagonist, Pninah, gets even less mention, so the novel does a lot of imaginative filling in the blanks. In this original essay for Beatrice, she explains why.

How would a woman react if she was unable to bear children, and her husband consoled himself by marrying another woman and having children with her? How would a woman respond if she found that, although she had borne her husband sons and daughters, he did not love her, but loved another woman and married her? And how would the two women–the barren and the unloved one–feel if they shared the same husband?

These are the questions that inspired my writing of The Song of Hannah. For this is the stuff the story of Hannah and Pninah, on which the novel is based, is made of. I had heard that story each year as it was read on the High Holidays in the synagogue, and each time these questions popped up in my mind.

It occurred to me that the grief of the barren woman, Hannah, was temporary; it dissolved the moment her son, the prophet Samuel, was born. By contrast, the unloved one, Pninah, was permanently and deeply injured. So I had little doubt that she would find a way to get back at both her rival and her husband.

So I decided to champion Pninah’s cause by writing a novel in which I would depict her hurt, her enmity toward Hannah and the revenge she wrought on her husband in the arms of a lover. But the heroines and heroes of the novel-in-the-making rebelled. They took over the story, and what started out as a tale of rivalry and revenge, gradually turned into a tale of redemption through friendship and love. In its course, both Hannah and Pninah are revealed as women of courage who stand up for each other’s and for their own interests in a male-dominated society.

(more…)

9 September 2005 | guest authors |

A Happy Update

You might recall that when Poppy Z. Brite and her husband fled New Orleans the weekend before Katrina hit, they had to leave behind more than two dozen cats. She has a bit of good news:

“Rescue team apparently got into our house. Got 14 cats and the snake; are going to try to go back for more. I don’t know which cats or where they are. Hoping for more info soon and will update as I can. I feel like a man who has just been pulled back from the edge of a deadly precipice. Thank you all, again, for the help. We still have a long, scary road ahead, but at least there is hope.”

8 September 2005 | uncategorized |