The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

With one very notable exception, whenever a book is adapted into a movie or television show, I refuse to watch it unless I’ve already read the book. I also almost always prefer the book. So I haven’t yet watched The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem on Netflix. I’m not sure I ever will, but I literally inhaled the book. 

The story follows multiple generations of women in a spaniol family living in Jerusalem from the Turkish occupation all the way through the founding of the modern state of Israel. To say they have difficult relationships with their mothers is an understatement larger than the Red Sea. The wheel of fortune turns faster than the sellers in Mahne Yehuda can talk, and we follow the family through both wealth and poverty. Underlying it all is a curse that seems to prevent the women from being loved by their spouses. This curse-follows-generations-of-women-in-a-family plot line seems to be a popular trope in Israeli literature, at least based on the Israeli novels in translation I stumbled upon in my local library when I was a kid. (I wish I remembered the names of those books). In fact, you can actually still find people today who perform the kind of livianos treatments with boiled lead that are mentioned in the book.

There’s a bit of framing where the story of the family is told to the youngest woman in the line who is seeking to piece together her own tumultuous relationship with her mother, but it is inconsistently used, and after the first third of the book largely abandoned. Confusingly it’s not a clean break – sometimes within the space of a few paragraphs the same character is referred to in the first person and then the third person without an explanation for the swapping of viewpoint. Once you move past it, things flow more easily until we return to first person narration for the last few pages.

In a book where the majority of the characters are Jewish, and mostly only associating with other Jews, the tension must also come from Jews. With the possible exception of Rachelika, the sister of the titular character, these people are extremely flawed. This means they’re also extremely human. Nuance is embraced in a way that is sadly becoming rarer and rarer these days. In addition to beautiful traditions like shabbat hamin, there is a patriarchy so strong that wives sometimes come off as glorified servants, and an Ashkenazi/Mizrahi divide so deep that a Mizrahi man falling for an Askenazi woman is taken as proof positive of her being Lilith incarnate. It’s historically accurate and eye opening. 

The choice to focus on a Spaniol family is an intriguing one. Many people have tried to gloss over the fact that there were Jews- particularly Mizrahi families- living in the region well before the 1940’s. Some of these families were living there from before anyone can even remember and others were refugees that immigrated when they were violently evicted from the Arab and Spanish speaking countries where they were living. Their very existence is an inconvenient truth, much like the chapter on how the Ein Kerem neighborhood was once occupied by Arabs until the War of Independence when they fled and Jews took it over. Not to mention the chapters depicting the role that the British empire played in causing all of this strife, which their descendants seem to have buried in their collective memories. These stories are important. They need to be told. You can’t wrap a pretty bow around a complicated narrative just to make it fit your current world view. This family is messy and the world they lived in was even messier. I appreciated the allowance for them to be fully rounded rather than card board cut outs.

Looking back on that Netflix show, I think I probably will never watch it because when I google and see the casting choices, I’m wary. I don’t mind that they shrunk two sisters into one – that seems to be the common move in central casting to save money. More bothersome to me is that the actress chosen for the lead – who is indeed beautiful, and I’m sure a very talented actress- doesn’t have the green eyes and red hair so focused on in the book. Instead those physical characteristics were given to the Ashkenazi love interest who tears the family apart. One wonders if the casting director felt the need to go with someone who displayed stereotypical Mizrahi features – dark hair, dark eyes – to prevent audience confusion as to why a green eyed red head is speaking Ladino. All Ashkenazim looking blond and blue eyed and all sephardim presenting with tan skin and dark hair is one of the biggest misconceptions about Jews that exists in the general public and amongst our own communities. I loved that The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem book chose to show the full breath of these communities and push back against the stereotypes about who should look like what. Having lived in Mizrahi communities, I can tell you this is much more accurate than concluding a person with green eyes must be of German descent.

There is a commitment here to presenting the world as it is in reality, rather than the world we create in our heads to suit our own needs and prejudices. In fact, I’d argue this is one of the strongest messages in The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, as evidenced in the conclusion. Only when all the truths, including the inconvenient ones, are brought to light can we understand our histories and move forward to find resolution. Perhaps when everyone starts looking at their full pasts, rather than trying to find someone else to blame, there can be understanding, healing, and hope. 

---

Find It: Goodreads | Bookshop | Amazon