Book 120: "The Tribe" by Bari Wood
Thursday, December 28th, 2006 21:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeAn Orthodox Jewish man wouldn't shake hands with a grown woman because she might be bleeding and even her touch would make him impure. Keep yourself free of blood, the Torah said, but she couldn't do that, no woman could. Then laws weren't for women, she thought. Maybe because women weren't people to the lawgivers, they were the "other". Like Lilith, the demon. But if the laws weren't for them, they weren't bound by them either. They could lie, cheat, steal. They could dishonour father, mother, God - their God. They could kill.
I wouldn't exactly say that the story "builds to a masterly climax of shrivelling terror" as it claims on the cover, and as soon as I'd read the back cover blurb I knew what the the answer to the mystery would be, but it was quite interesting. I could believe in the elderly Jews still stuck in wartime, trapped by their memories of the camps, and in Rachel, frustrated by a religion that seems designed only for men, but Roger never seemed like a real person to me.
I wouldn't exactly say that the story "builds to a masterly climax of shrivelling terror" as it claims on the cover, and as soon as I'd read the back cover blurb I knew what the the answer to the mystery would be, but it was quite interesting. I could believe in the elderly Jews still stuck in wartime, trapped by their memories of the camps, and in Rachel, frustrated by a religion that seems designed only for men, but Roger never seemed like a real person to me.
