Rabbi Pamela Wax's Review of Drawing in the Dust for the Reform Jewish Quarterly:
In Jeremiah 16, God tells the prophet, "You are not to marry and not to have sons and daughters in this place." Uncharacteristically for a man of his time, Jeremiah indeed remained unmarried. Yet, like Hosea before him, he used the imagery of married love to express the relationship between God and Israel. Abraham Joshua Heschel makes a case for Jeremiah's self-perception as God's celibate bride. However an aggadah in Bava Kama 16b paints Jeremiah as a sexual being, whom the people maliciously accused of illicit relations. Because another midrash traces Jeremiah's lineage through Rahab, his proclivity for harlots-- and therefore the possibility of not being celibate -- was apparently established in the Rabbinic mind.
Jeremiah's divinely imposed bachelorhood (no other prophet was forbidden to marry) and the discomfort it raises provided Zoe Klein the seed for her wonderfully inventive novel in which she explores the possibility of Anatiya, the handmaiden cum prophetess, who loves Jeremiah from afar and late in life becomes his lover.
Unlike Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, which brought us directly into a contemporaneous biblical world, Drawing in the Dust remains fully ensconced in the twenty-first century. We never actually meet Anatiya or Jeremiah in real time. We are introduced to them only through their writings and the imaginings of the novel's characters. The protagonist, Page Brookstone, is an American-born Catholic archaeologist living in Israel whose historic find of artifacts related to the prophet Jeremiah includes cistern painting of his life and the exile, Anatiya's scroll, and the coffin in which Jeremiah and Anatiya's skeletons are found embracing for eternity.
The modern story is a page-turner, filled with intrigue about Arab-Israeli relation, secular academic politicking, actual ultra-Orthodox backlash against the desecration of Jeremiah's grave, and a Christian fundamentalist plot to bring Armageddon. It is also a love story in and of itself; the publicized love story of Jeremiah and Anatiya creates an epidemic of love throughout the world and forever changes the trajectory of Page's life.
Bu the real gift of Zoe Klein's novel is Anatiya's scroll itself. One is sure to be tantalized by the snippets in Drawing in the Dust and will therefore be delighted to know that the fictional scroll is available in its entirety as a separate book entitled The Scroll of Anatiya. Its fifty-two chapters, written in beautiful lyrical language in a biblical style that plays off of the fifty-two chapters of the book of Jeremiah, rivals the Song of Songs as a text of longing, desire, and ultimate consummation. But it is also a testament to Jeremiah's suffering from an outsider's perspective. Anatiya's is a parallel experience to that of Jeremiah. When he says at his commissioning (Jer.1), "I don't know how to speak," Anatiya herself becomes mute for life, writing, "When God put out a hand and touched your mouth, God put out another hand and touched the tip of a finger to my lips, whispering, 'shhh'..." (p. 194). When God famously sends Jeremiah to study the work of the potter (Jer. 18), Anatiya's chapter 18 brings us the words of the potter himself: "If you have no respect for the void and its immense power...then you cannot understand" (p.95).
The novel implies that Jeremiah's metaphors are not all his own, that they come to him through his interactions with Anatiya. His reference in Jeremiah 1:13 to a steaming pot as a metaphor for the lands to the north is a reference in Antiya's parallel verse, "to an actual steaming pot with which she cooks" for him (p. 196). Page therefore asserts, "Wherever he is metaphorical, she is literal," speculating that Jeremiah could "have been watching her and drawing his metaphors from her."
The novel and the scroll thereby provide wonderful lessons in intertextuality. As Page is about to notate for academic posterity that Anatiya's verse "I like awake on my couch" is a reference to Song of Songs, she hesitates, reflecting, "Who is to say whether the phrase originated with an outside source or with Anatiya herself? Who is to say that Jeremiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Job aren't all quoting her?" Recognizable verses from these and other biblical texts find their way into Anatiya's prose and thrill the knowledgeable Bible reader.
We are in the fortunate position of having more authentic information about Jeremiah than about any other Jebrew prophet. Not only is his book one of the longest in Tanach, containing a considerable amount of biographical information (preserved by his scribe Baruch), but also a number of passages often referred to as Jeremiah's "confessions" vividly reveal his inner life, including outcries and prayers and a few of God's responses, as well. Nonetheless, through Anatiya's fictional writings, which both headline each chapter of Drawing in the Dust and are later interspersed in the fictional narrative, we are presented with the possibility of an even fuller emotional and experiential range for our beleaguered prophet. Yes, Anatiya's scroll paints the picture we already have in our minds of the divine burden Jeremiah carries, his public rejection, the inner tension between his natural inclination toward introspection and his deep sense of vocation and loyality. But we also entertain the possibility that he was loved by a woman who suffered with him and for him, whose own life mirrored his own, and whose metaphors become part of his prophecies.
Elie Weisel writes of Jeremiah that, "there was no joy in his life, ever. No pleasant surprises, no warmth, no smiles; nothing but sorrow, anguish and tears. Words of woe and anger -- words he was made to speak against his will. He wanted to speak of other things; he wanted to be a normal person dealing with customary human problems and not with eternity and death, but he had no choice."
Zoe Klein gave Jeremiah that choice in Drawing in the Dust, in which joy, pleasant surprises, and a person named Jeremiah dealing with customary human problems like love can exist. While the speed with which the archaeological dig and the translation of the scroll unfolds defies credibility, straining the reader's suspension of disbelief, the delight provided by Anatiya's scroll itself are well-worth these shortcoming of the contemporary narrative.
The novel spoon-feeds the reader some of the connections between the book of Jeremiah and Anatiya's scroll, but the real thrill of the hunt is in trying to find one's own connections, moving back and forth from Anatiya's text to the Book of Jeremiah. Close readers of Jeremiah will search for the clues that Rabbi Klein herself may have found therein to inspire Anatiya's writings. Where Anatiya writes in chapter 22, "If you were a signet ring upon my right hand, I would press you into the wax and seal each of my scrolls with your sign," Jeremiah 22:24 quotes God angrily telling the king, "If you were a signet on my right hand, I would tear you off even from there." When God commands Jeremiah to make and wear a yoke on his neck (Jer 27:2), Anatiya writes (in her own chapter 27), "If I could spirit that yoke away...but God guards you so tightly" (p. 150).
The possibilities for creative adult education abound, both to inspire a deeper appreciation of our great prophet Jeremiah as well as to teach about themes such as intertextuality, ur-texts, or contemporary midrash. Themes and images from Jeremiah's prophecy take on new significance through Rabbi Klein's rereading. She does a remarkable job of bringing Jeremiah to life in new ways, of expanding the boundaries of our religious imaginations. This includes the astounding assertion that the Jerusalem that Jeremiah wrote about in Lamentations was not a place at all, but was Anatiya herself. Reading the book for that episode alone would be dayeinu, but there is so much more to be grateful for.
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