The Dovekeepers

For me, the experience of reading Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers doesn’t begin with the book, but at Bat Mitzvah.

It was August, and my family was in Israel, in the hottest part of the summer,  in the hottest part of the country, less than eighteen miles from the shores of the Dead Sea. A war was raging on the northern border. To the south, I was to become a Bat Mitzvah on Masada, the location of Judaism’s most famous mass suicide, where near a thousand Jewish Zealots were said to have chosen death over slavery to the Romans.

Why Masada? Like much of Israel, the ancient history and biblical significance was but a backdrop for the quotidian. Masada might have been a place of war and Sicarii, a palace where King Herod was said to have heard the voices of his enemies in its walls, but it was also the location of my father’s Bar Mitzvah ceremony and where he worked his first summer job.  A close childhood friend of his and fellow Masada employee had made his career on the mountain, eventually becoming Director of the site, which made the logistics of planning across oceans and time zones much easier. Meaningful and convenient. 

Like my siblings, I became a Bat Mitzvah twice. Once in the US, where we live. The other celebration was to be in Israel, for the benefit of the friends and family my dad left behind when he married my mom and immigrated to the US. Unlike the big, formal parties we had in America, the celebrations in Israel were always intimate affairs. These celebrations were not unlike the smashed glass beneath the chuppah. Afterall, no Jewish life cycle even is complete without an acknowledgment of the broken connection, and the place left behind.

But where the mountain was inexorably part of my father’s life, here was another place I experienced in sharp, glittering fragments. When I think of that day, I remember it in pieces, face-melting heat punctured exactly once by a cool breeze, glimpses of family, some that I would see that one day and never again. I don’t remember a word that I said. My words weren’t the thing worth remembering. I remember looking out at the vast, craggy Negev stretching out endlessly beneath a hazy blue sky. Tiny bright pieces, enough to cut and imbed themselves beneath the skin and impossible to reassemble.

When I encountered The Dovekeepers, nearly ten years later, I hadn’t thought much of Masada, which had been added to so many other little things that had made their mark on me and yet were not mine: places I had not been, languages I could not really speak, history I had not witnessed, pain I had not endured,  bravery I could never possibly match.Which is why perhaps I had not anticipated being so moved by Hoffman’s epic reimagining of the siege.

Much can be said about the depth of research of this book, the ability of Hoffman’s writing to render life in an ancient fortress with immediacy and intimacy. The novel is gorgeous and completely immersive and heartrending.  But what makes the narrative simply unlike anything else that has been said of Masada, is it’s told through the eyes of its women. 

This simple shift in perspective entirely transformed my perspective on a history that I knew so well, the version where only the men ever had names. Rather than a mere recitation of historical facts, The Dovekeepers claims the pen for a perspective dramatically underserved in so many of the stories we tell of Jewish history. Especially Masada, where to me it seemed that everything had already been said, that the narrative had already been set in stone, Hoffman proved that this was not so.

In reading The Dovekeepers, I considered for the first time all these pieces that I had simply accepted were part of me and not mine. Not just Masada, but the hundred other fragments of place and history of which I’d been assembled. Where else had I come to accept that my words weren’t worth remembering? I had always assumed that that the narrative was for others to shape, that all I had was too fragmented and broken for anything whole. But if Hoffman breathed new life and a fresh perspective into an ancient ruin, what could I make out of all the history that made me? What would happen, if I were the one to claim the pen?

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