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By Laurel Corona
 SAN DIEGO—Readers familiar with the first two books of Maggie Anton’s acclaimed trilogy Rashi's Daughters (Book 1: Joheved and Book 2: Miriam) will already know to expect three different components in Book 3: Rachel which had its long-awaited release in August 2009. The first component is a compelling story about Jewish life in medieval France. The second is a crash course in medieval technologies, beliefs, and history (social, economic, and political) based on Anton’s meticulous research. The third is an intriguing glimpse into the complexities of the Talmud and how it shaped the lives of the Jews of Ashkenaz.
Anton’s many fans and followers will not be disappointed by the third installment, and in fact will find themselves wishing Rashi had more daughters, so the saga could continue. Anton’s skill at writing a compelling narrative has grown steadily over the three books. This one opens enticingly with an angry Rachel considering going to the beit din to exercise the conditional divorce clause in her ketubah. The reader learns that due to the dangers of travel, Jewish traders often included such clauses as a means of allowing their wives a get if they did not return. Jewish law requires proof of death, and therefore a fatal mishap with no survivors returning as witnesses would leave a woman unable to marry again, even after many years.
Althought Rachel is indeed worried her husband, Eliezer, might not return, she is mostly furious. He has been gone only slightly more than the required six months, but he has returned late so often in the past she has lost her patience with his excuses. A get would mean he would need to court and marry her again, and of course he would, since it’s a good marriage, with a son and a daughter, and they both have deep ties within the community of Troyes. Using the conditional get would be a means only of teaching him a lesson, which she sorely wants to do.
The next scene shows Eliezer bound to a tree, captured for ransom by highwaymen, starving because one of his malicious captors will only offer him bacon to eat, which he refuses even after a number of days. Such realities of Jewish life serve to get the novel off to a truly page-turning start. Throughout, the story line is very compelling, providing rich details about the familial and commercial lives of medieval Jews and weaving it in to the sociopolitical realities of the time. Life is very hard and often terrifying for Rashi’s daughters and their fellow Jews. Some of the best scenes in the book are emotionally overwhelming in their brutality--the outbreak of virulent anti-Semitism following the call to the First Crusade forms part of the backdrop of the book, as do the myriad threats to women’s lives as a result of childbearing. But Rashi's Daughters: Rachel is also lovely in many of its details— among these, tending the famed Talmudic scholar Rashi’s vineyards, and using a secluded local pool off the Seine and Saône rivers as a mikveh.
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The two crash courses in the book, the overview of medieval technologies and other aspects of life at the time, and the Talmudic discussions that permeate the book, are on the one hand truly fascinating, and on the other hand detrimental to the flow of the narrative. As a historical novelist myself, I know how much work goes into researching a new book, and how many truly astounding and interesting things authors learn as a result. It’s hard to accept that a great deal of our research cannot find its way gracefully into a novel, and that as a result, much of what we would like readers to know we simply can’t tell them without sacrificing our first commitments, which must be to the story,the characters, and the conventions of dialogue and narrative. Susan Vreeland, who broke into the first echelon of historical novelists with Girl in Hyacinth Blue and The Passion of Artemisia, had labeled such flaws “research dumps.” It’s excruciating to know there’s so much more to tell the reader, but the solution in a novel cannot be to take the fiction-writer’s hat off and become a professor. Dialogue can’t be used to deliver a lecture on the process of making cloth, for example, as Anton does. People simply don’t talk that way to each other. There are certain kinds of background information members of a community already have, and it sounds odd to have them tell each other what to them would be commonplace and obvious, just because the reader might not know it.
I hate to call this a weakness in Anton’s writing because the “research dumps” and the Talmudic discussion are so interesting they are really two other good reasons to read her books.
However, when even in the midst of community crises, the reader is stopped for another lengthy exegesis of a Talmudic tractate in the form of characters arguing over what to do about a new problem, the book can become a different kind of page-turner as the reader leafs forward to get back to the story. No doubt, in households like Rashi’s, the Talmud did indeed serve as such a be-all and end-all, and Anton’s treatment is therefore right on the mark. It doesn’t work so well, however, for the reader more interested in getting to know the characters deeply and continuing with a compelling story.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got as a novelist was that at the point a reader steps back and thinks “oh, I’m reading a novel,” the spell of the book has been broken. If Anton’s goal was to create that kind of spell, where the reader is wrapped up continuously, truly transported to another place and time, this book falls short of that. If her goal was to create a book that offers a great story to underpin a broader educational purpose, this book is a triumph. Regardless of any shortcomings, Rachel, and the other volumes in Rashi's Daughters are truly essential reading for those looking for “smart reads” about European Jews in the Middle Ages.
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