Ragen, Naomi 1949-

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RAGEN, Naomi 1949-

(N. T. Erline)

PERSONAL: Born July 10, 1949, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Louis (a cab driver) and Ada (a secretary; maiden name, Fogel) Terlinsky; married Alex Ragen (a systems analyst), November 24, 1969; children: Bracha, Asher, Rachel, Akiva. Education: Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, B.A. (cum laude), 1971; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, M.A., 1975. Religion: Orthodox Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—c/o P.O. Box 23004, Ramot, Jerusalem, Israel. Agent—Lisa Bankoff, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Israel Environmental Protection Service, Jerusalem, publications editor, 1975-79; freelance writer, 1979-81; University of Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA, director of development communications, 1981-82; San Jose Hospital Foundation, San Jose, CA, development coordinator, 1982-84; fiction writer, 1984—.

MEMBER: International PEN, Authors Guild, Authors League of America.

WRITINGS:

novels

Jephte's Daughter, Warner Books (New York, NY), 1989.

Sotah, Crown (New York, NY), 1992.

The Sacrifice of Tamar, Crown (New York, NY), 1994.

The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

Chains around the Grass, Toby Press (Jerusalem, Israel), 2002.

other

(Editor, under pseudonym N. T. Erline) Baruch Halpui Epstein, My Uncle the Netziv, Targum Press (Southfield, MI), 1988.

(Editor, under pseudonym N. T. Erline) Baruch Halpui Epstein, Recollections: The Torah Temimah Recalls the Golden Age of European Jewry, translation by Moshe Dombe, Targum Press (Southfield, MI), 1989.

Minyan Nashim (play; title means "A Quorum of Women"), produced in Tel Aviv, Israel, at Habimah, 2002.

Columnist, Jerusalem Post, 1998-2001. Contributor to periodicals, including Hadassah, Environmental Management, and Features from Jerusalem.

SIDELIGHTS: Naomi Ragen's novels explore individual struggles within ultra-Orthodox Jews' faith and traditions. Ragen once told CA: "My writing is deeply reflective of the philosophy, idioms, and values of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and related sources. D. H. Lawrence was a model, as well as E. M. Forster, Irwin Shaw, and Leo Tolstoy, who was also a deeply religious writer. Good and evil, their definition and interaction, interest me.

"My first novel, Jephte's Daughter, deals with the modern-day world of Chassidic Jews in Jerusalem. It is the coming-of-age story of a young Chassidic woman who struggles to reconcile deeply felt religious teachings with her own desire for freedom and growth. My character's education is very similar to my own Orthodox upbringing. The main difficulty was to demonstrate convincingly that religion can enrich as well as suffocate, depending on its interpretation. Though I was aiming for a mass readership, I didn't want to achieve popularity by embracing the easy, cliche road of having her abandon religion and embrace modern secularism. It was vital to me that my character find her freedom without abandoning her religious beliefs—to show that the two are not mutually exclusive.

"I wanted the reader to identify with her love for her religion, to feel compassion for her suffering despite the foreignness of her lifestyle. I wanted the reader to step into her shoes, to understand her reasoning, to see the world through her eyes. I tried to achieve this through vivid, accurate detail."

Jephte's Daughter tells the story of Batsheva, a young woman from a prosperous Orthodox Jewish family in Los Angeles, when she is transplanted to Jerusalem following a marriage arranged by her father to a Talmudic scholar who turns out to be abusive. She must escape with her son to seek a new life. "Despite eloquent writing and vivid characters," wrote a Publishers Weekly critic, the story "falters under convenient plot machinations that compromise the full development of its religious and emotional themes." New York Times Book Review contributor Katrina Blickle noted that while the portrayal of Batsheva is "sympathetic and realistic," the novel fails to overcome "repetitive, breathless prose … ridiculous plot … and sophomoric theologizing." In contrast, a Kirkus Reviews assessment described Jephte's Daughter as an "emotionally potent book" that is "written with welcome, no-nonsense clarity, and resolutely surely sure of its subject matter."

Ragen's second novel, Sotah, "continues her exploration of orthodox Jewish life in [a] story of a woman accused of adultery," commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The woman, Dina, lives among the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem; as a result of the accusations, she leaves for New York. "This readable, but at times simplistic novel… [is] a stronger work of fiction than Jephte's Daughter," determined a Publishers Weekly critic, who praised Sotah's ability to hold "the reader's attention throughout." According to Rapport reviewer John R. Carroll, Sotah "is rich … rich in history, rich in characterizations, rich in details and rich in [religious] tradition…. [outlining] for the non-Jew a world that may seem foreign and distant, but remains very very real." Carroll wrote: "One does not have to be Jewish to appreciate Dina's story." According to Ragen, this is the ultimate compliment.

Ragen once explained to CA her goal in writing: "Bruno Bettelheim wrote in Surviving the Holocaust that 'this ability of our imagination to suffer with and for our fellow human beings is the best, possibly the only protection against another catastrophe such as the one Hitler's Third Reich brought about.' A novel that reaches out to readers and draws them into an alien culture, a new environment, allowing them to exercise and extend their compassion toward fictional characters is a humanizing experience. If my work has achieved that even once with even one reader, I'd consider it a success."

The Sacrifice of Tamar, Ragen's third novel, once again expounds on her belief that, as a Kirkus Reviews contributor reported, "fulfillment can be found outside the rigid boundaries of community but within the teachings of the commandments." In this story Tamar, a married Orthodox Jewish woman, is raped by a black man and subsequently becomes pregnant. Unsure if the rapist or her husband the father—her child was born with white skin—Tamar discloses the attack only to two close woman friends but is plagued by her secret for decades. "Despite an awkward, self-conscious opening, this rewarding novel gradually endears itself to the patient reader," remarked Glen Gerhart in Rapport. Gerhart called the novel "a satisfyingly poignant story…. a chronicle of the moral and spiritual quest we all must make," but noted that at times Ragen's extensive discussion of religious and cultural customs interferes with her storytelling. A Publishers Weekly critic also found this aspect of the book tedious and complained that the novel presented few new revelations about the "insular and provincial world that she has chosen to portray." This reviewer concluded that Ragen's "plots are becoming hackneyed" despite her being "an able storyteller" and her facility for dialogue. Kirkus Reviews summed up The Sacrifice of Tamar by calling it "cliche-ridden and predictable, but also strangely affecting."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1988, review of Jephte's Daughter, p. 1559; August 1, 1992, review of Sotah, p. 943; August 15, 1994, review of The Sacrifice of Tamar, pp. 1080-1081.

New York Times Book Review, April 2, 1989, Katrina Blickle, review of Jephte's Daughter, p. 28; March 5, 1995, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, October 28, 1988, review of Jephte's Daughter, p. 63; August 31, 1992, review of Sotah, p. 64; September 12, 1994, review of The Sacrifice of Tamar, p. 81.

Rapport, March, 1993, John R. Carroll, review of Sotah, p. 27; May, 1995, Glen Gerhart, review of The Sacrifice of Tamar, p. 21.

Times (London, England), July 17, 1989.