Sacred     by Éliette Abécassis, Translated by Karen Newby Original title: La Répudiée Original language: French Original year: 2000 Country: France   Published by Aurora Metro Press Pub. Date: January 2003 Pub. Place: London Format: Paperback, 140 pages ISBN: 0953675785 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: £9.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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A book that is both a cri-de-coeur from and a celebration of the closed ultra-Orthodox world of Israel’s Hasidic population in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem.


Abécassis is a new (to English-speakers) Jewish writer from France making an appearance with a powerful, interesting little book about a woman’s experience amongst very pious ‘fundamentalist’ Jews. Abécassis had some input to the screenplay of Amos Gitai’s film Kadosh but Sacred is a more subtle work in many ways. Although the fate of its female protagonist — a wife repudiated after ten years of an otherwise happy marriage because of her apparent infertility — is a harsh one, the book doesn’t carry the simple anti-Haredi (as the ultra-Orthodox are called in Israel) message of Gitai’s film. In a poetic but not ornate prose Abécassis transmits a flavour of the past-within-the present existence of these religious-based communities. As well as documenting, for example, the questionable role of the larger-than-life figure of the Rebbe (Hasidic leader) whose every utterance, sigh and belch has significance for the faithful, she convincingly explores the sense of spiritual exaltation of a woman whose daily rhythm immerses her in the mystic imagery of Judaism.


More unexpectedly, given the setting, she gives us a sense of a deeply sexually content couple, very much in love but morally, socially, rabbinically enjoined to follow the injunction to have children.


Although forced into a position where she has every right to rebel the heroine is not really rebel material, and here the book parts company with a parallel literary tradition, mainly male, of turn of the (19th to 20th) century Yiddish writers from the Shtetl (I.L.Peretz amongst a hundred others) who, in more or less autobiographical form, told of their personal rebellion against the same theocratic conditions in rural Poland and Russia rather than, as here, transplanted to contemporary Israel.


A difference in these similar experiences of conflict between communal and personal will and wellbeing is that Sacred reveals how a woman may be bound by profound ties of love and therefore has a different perhaps more difficult road to follow.

‘I descended the steps of the pool, immersing myself in he water until it covered my chest, Then I plunged my head under the water seven times. And so I was cleansed, to return to my husband a new woman, just like on my wedding day, to recommence our story together, right from the very beginning. And just as the moon each month begins afresh, so a woman renews herself each mother, and her husband looks on her as a new wife. For this water is spring water, rainwater, and when the waters from heaven merge with the waters from below, they are the waters of creation. Deep down, at the bottom of the pool, I become aware of the source, the bond with the whole of existence, deep down, at the bottom of the pool, there is silence, absolute silence. Immersed in the waters, my body rediscovers its origins’ 97