woman, wiry and quick. She spoke quickly, moved quickly, and she did everything as if there wasn’t enough time, which was a very odd thing as we didn’t have clocks or watches yet. It was just her temperament: speedy. All the women in the family had jobs, and Bilhah was in charge of food preparation. When I talk about my family I’m speaking of more than eighty-five people, plus servants and guests. Bilhah didn’t do all the cooking herself, but she did coordinate it, which was a lot of work, like running a summer camp, which I only mention because it’s something I once did, back in Germany, between the two World Wars, work at a Jewish summer camp. Maybe I liked her because I associated her with food. All of us kids did. Or maybe I liked her because of who she was, sweet and warm herself, femme in a way that I liked even as a little girl. She and grandfather had two sons and a daughter named Ahuvah. Sadly, Bilhah got into some trouble later on, but I’ll tell you about it when I get there.
In spite of a certain, I would say, natural nostalgia for the past, I can’t help but comment on the insanity of slavery, concubinage, and the insane way in which people were bought and sold and given away as gifts. These things all still go on, under different names, but they were horrible then and are horrible now, only it never occurred to me to question them for about a thousand years. So you have to remember that my grandmother Zilpah was Bilhah’s older sister, and Leah’s maid—her property actually. Eventually Leah gave Zilpah to my grandfather, as people did back then, and they had two sons together, Uncle Gad and my father Asher, and three daughters, my aunts, Bikurah, Hadar, and Yael. Grandma Zilpah was a taller version of her sister Bilhah, but she was very different in temperament. Bilhah was fast and my grandmother was slow. Her words were slow, her actions were slow. She walked with a slow rolling gait and she was always the last one done eating, to the annoyance of her sister, who liked to have all the eating utensils washed up and put away as soon as she herself was done eating. Not that our table was very fancy. To begin with, we didn’t have a table. We all ate sitting on the ground, from clay bowls, with our fingers, sitting on woven mats and animal skins.
My grandma’s job was shearing, weaving, garment and rug making. We needed a lot of it, cloth for garments, rugs and coverings for the floors of our tents, and for the backs of our donkeys and camels, although we also traded for a lot of the skins and fabric we used, and got a lot of our rugs from the Bedouins. Grandma was always bent over a floor loom, or doing hand-weaving from a loom that was strung between her body and a tree trunk, or sewing or mending, or embroidering. She tried to teach me and my sister Tamimah. I was terrible at it and Tamimah was good. Besides, by the time that I arrived, Grandma was always sick, with one thing or another, and spent more and more of her time in her tent. Looking back on it now I’d say she had rheumatoid arthritis in her legs, but we didn’t know about that then. We called what she had “the achy bone disease,” to distinguish it from the “stabbing bone disease, the “burning bone disease,” and several other similar disorders.
Even when she was sick, Grandma kept weaving. She had a wonderful sense of color and style. I would give anything to have one of her garments, but alas, none of them survived, except in stories. It was she who Grandpa Jacob went to when he wanted to give Uncle Joseph a special gift, and she wove and embroidered the cloak that you can still read about, the coat of many colors is what it’s usually called, although that’s not the case at all. It was deep blue and had long hanging sleeves, and I may have more to say about it later. Her hands were always stained with dyes, and she was the one who hennaed the hands and feet of all the women in our family. Once, in the late Middle Ages, I tried my hand again at embroidery, and made a cover for an ark using one of her designs. I worked on it for years and it hung for years in a synagogue in Mainz, but it wasn’t anything like Grandma would have made, and was sort of an embarrassment to me. I was glad when they threw it out after about thirty years.
Now you know the basic cast of characters for my tale, with one exception. After Rachel his beloved wife died, my grandfather Jacob married a third full wife, a lovely younger woman named Adah bat Idrah. She was a Perizzite, the daughter of a local chieftain, a woman of power and influence in our area. Idrah her mother did a lot of trading with our family. This is how she and Jacob met. Idrah’s family were well known for making what were later called idols, but we mostly thought of them as souvenirs or decorative art. I liked Adah a lot, and I liked her three daughters, Gali, Anat, and Batshuah. Now I can hear you muttering, “What the hell is she talking about this time? They aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible!” And that’s exactly my point. In the one that exists today women are only mentioned when something they did or was done to them had something to do with the men around them—and a wife who only bore her husband daughters was left out of the text along with those three daughters, who were my cousins and earliest playmates.
On this note (and notice please how short a paragraph this is) I will stop. The tent awaits. (And if you think I’ve forgotten about Dinah, or about Joseph’s disappearance, I haven’t.)
Chapter Five
Here the author finally tells you,
her dear and patient readers,
the story of her birth and
of her early years in a tent
The sky was blue, cloudless, and achingly clear. I know this because whenever we were having one of those days, Arsiyah my mother would stop and say, “Serach, this was exactly the kind of day that you were born on. Unlike your brother Imnah,” her firstborn, “who showed up right in the middle of a blizzard.” Most people don’t think of blizzards when they think about Canaan, but they do happen from time to time. We had a really big one during Roman times. Beautiful, and deadly. To this day I can close my eyes and see the desert all covered with snow, and the clouds so dense and the snow swirling about us, thick and dry. And the silence. That perfect, silencing silence.
My mother was a short round woman with a kindly smile, who was always a bit nervous, but she tried to not let that get in the way of anyone else. Her childhood was a difficult one. Her village had been burned down, its men killed, the woman and children sold into slavery. She and her mother Kalanit were freed by their owner, after many years of loyal service, and it was to my father Asher’s credit that he married her. Freed men and women didn’t have the highest status, but my grandmother Kalanit had been a priestess and her status remained with her and was part of what inspired her owner to free her. I never knew my grandmother, but my mother talked about her a lot, especially as she got older. My strongest memories of my mother are toward the end of her life, when, with her dark hair streaked with gray, pulled back from her face, she sat in the dirt, bent over a fire, cooking for us, and always singing or humming a song, in her raw, off-key, enthusiastic voice.
My mother liked to tell that story about my birth, and over the years it came to mean more and more to me, a blue thread woven through time, for a woman who never had biological children of her own. It never occurred to me to ask my mother what day of the week I was born on, as days of the week were still a new idea and we didn’t number years yet, which I already mentioned, and we honored the new moon but didn’t otherwise pay very much attention to months, although they all had names. But I liked it that I was born on a clear day. “It was the beginning of spring,” Mother added. And to this very day, when the sky is blue and cloudless and achingly clear, like glass, I think of it as my day, my own special day, a day made just for me to be born on.
Being born is really not such a special thing. Billions of people have been born on this planet. And billions of people have died here too. What’s unusual is to have been born here but not to have died. Yet. I didn’t realize at first that I wouldn’t die. In fact, for the longest time, it simply never occurred to me. I just kept getting older. So when, you’re probably wondering, did I realize that I wasn’t going to die? Well I would have to answer that question as I did before, by saying that I still expect to die, still think of myself as a mortal creature, not an angel or a vampire. Just a mortal creature who’s lived a very, very long time.
Once,
