Thursday, November 01, 2012

Review of Anton, Rav Hisda's Daughter

BOOK REVIEW AT THE TALMUD BLOG: Review: Maggie Anton’s Rav Hisda’s Daughter- Guest Post by Ilana Kurshan. Excerpt:
The discussions that come alive in this book are Talmudic as well as academic, which may explain why this novel will have so much appeal for readers like myself who are steeped in the Talmudic text and the scholarship about its context. For readers who do not experience the pleasure of the familiar in its fictionalized form, Anton’s novel celebrates our rich and colorful textual heritage and reminds us that feminist history is often a return to the material and the real – to the beer the scholars drank, the springs in which they bathed, the cycle of blood that dictated their most intimate relationships, and the rooms in which they studied texts that occasionally refer to wives and daughters whose lives we can at best imagine.
Earlier coverage of Anton and her books is here and links