Alice Hoffman may be the most uneven writer in America. A trip through her enormous body of work — for adults and young people — is a jarring ride, from the loveliness of “Illumination Night” to the schlockiness of “The River King.” Hang on tight and you’ll swerve from the quiet power of her short stories in “Local Girls” to the groaning hokiness of “The Ice Queen.” In bestseller after bestseller, she explores women’s subjects and feminist themes, especially ancient and modern expressions of witchcraft. Sometimes, the results are practically magic; sometimes, they’re practically laughable.
But nothing she’s written would prepare you for the gravitas of her new book, an immersive historical novel about Masada during the Roman siege in the 1st century. “The Dovekeepers” is an enormously ambitious, multi-part story, richly decorated with the details of life 2,000 years ago. What’s more, as Anita Diamant showed so popularly with “The Red Tent,” the world of ancient Judaism provides fertile ground for exploring the challenges of women’s lives, and, fortunately, this time Hoffman treats her favorite issues without throwing up much of the fairy dust that too often clogs her work.
(Scribner) - "The Dovekeepers: A Novel" by Alice Hoffman
The tragedy at Masada has echoed down the ages, subjected to various political and inspirational uses, since it was first described by Josephus, the only contemporary source. According to his “Jewish War,” after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, a group of Jews known as the Zealots took refuge in Herod’s old cliff-lined fortress. The Romans, unwilling to tolerate this holdout of rebels and assassins, laid siege, built a containment wall and then constructed an enormous ramp. When they finally smashed their way through the walls, they found that almost a thousand men, women and children were already dead, a preemptive move to keep themselves from being killed or enslaved by the Romans.
That act of defiance still serves as a touchstone for the Israeli army, but its horrific finale makes a daunting barricade for a fiction writer to scale. The battle between Governor Silva and Eleazar ben Ya’ir — invincible military might on one side and inflexible religious commitment on the other — lays waste to our modern interest in subtlety, irony and conflicted human characters. Hoffman doesn’t ignore the larger-than-life leaders and their deadly clash, but her creative path into Masada is from the ground up: not through its generals and warriors, but through its mothers, daughters and wives. The result is a high-minded feminist story of unassailable seriousness. Whether that makes it appealing for the many fans of Hoffman’s previous novels remains to be seen.
“The Dovekeepers” is divided into four primary sections, each narrated by a different woman who describes her life before arriving at this sealed community of violent rebels high on a plateau:
●Yael is the long-suffering daughter of a Sicarii assassin, who never forgives her for his wife’s death in childbirth. “I was not afraid of cruelty,” she tells us. “I knew it was inside me, as it was inside the leopard who must catch his supper to survive.”
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