The Sacrifice of Tamar by Naomi Ragen

From the Author's Foreword...

The Sacrifice of Tamar is the third - and last - book of what I have begun to call my "haredi trilogy," which includes Jepthe's Daughter and Sotah. I didn't know when I wrote Jephte's Daughter more than a decade ago, that I would be returning again and again to mine the rich lode of material provided by the lives of religious Jewish women. Yet, with the completion of each book, I felt questions arise that I needed another book to answer.

Jepthe's Daughter was the story of the atypical: A Chassidic princess married to a great scholar, who turns out to be both less and more than he appears. Sotah tried to focus on the ordinary lives of haredi Jews living in Jerusalem, and to give some of the real texture of everyday life. With The Sacrifice of Tamar, I wanted a story based in the haunts of my own childhood, the neighbourhoods of New York I knew so well, comparing the lives of haredi women in the Diaspora to those in Israel. The Sacrifice of Tamar was also my most critical book, the one in which I gave myself the most freedom to express my opinions about the shortcomings of the social strictures that often impeded - even strangled - the true progress of religious life based on Jewish law. Perhaps too, it answers with the greatest force those of my critics in the religious world who have suggested that social problems in the religious Jewish world are better dealt with in silence under the cover of darkness. Those people are convinced that the perpetuation of social evils is preferable to the embarrassment that comes with their exposure. I remain convinced that the opposite is true.