The Saturday Wife by Naomi Ragen Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Saturday Wife
Book Review: A Saturday Wife
Summary: 5 Stars
This is very different from Naomi Regan's other books. It's truly a novel but I loved it!! It was a very interesting picture of a girl that married someone she wasn't sure of and of her quest for a "rich" life, in every sense of the word. Naomi....you go girl!! Can't wait for your next book. Thank you, Judy RockBook Review: A superb book writen by a woman to women
Summary: 5 Stars
last night I finished reading the book - The Saturday Wife...
It is nice. Very well written, funny, raising the curiosity for the next chapter... A lot of information for converts and some of ours...
Being from a Babylonian heritage growing in Israel, had little difficulty in the "English" pronunciation of the Hebrew words in Ashkenazi (vuz vuz accent) :-D :-D
Yes. My Yeddish vocabulary was sufficient to understand it all...
It is a book written by a woman (a very good one of ours) for women, exploring the eternal temptations of the young and the restless...
My present wife is going to read it too. She is 1/2 a convert. No kosher kitchen, No "trifa" of any kind. No Cheese on the meat, but follow the tradition... It will very much enhance her knowledge in our heritage... I recommend it to the "mixed" couples as a text book too...
Thank you Naomi. This is from me and from many others to you, that they just smile reading it and go to their next chores...
I shall spread the word more about it...
yossi shochat
Cincinnati, Ohio
Book Review: Awesome book especially if you are jewish and from Long Island
Summary: 5 Stars
Funny book about Jewish life and New York. Loved it so much bought a book for my mom.Book Review: Cautionary tragic comedy about a Rabbi's wife bent on self-destruction
Summary: 2 Stars
Over the years, I've been following the novels of Naomi Ragen, set in the modern world as seen through the eyes of her Orthodox Jewish men and women. Throughout temptations and blows, they all manage to come through questioning their faith in a world that doesn't understand them, and still being themselves.
In this one, however, that doesn't look to be the case. The tale of Delilah Goldgrab is a sad one, where a beautiful girl from working class parents longs to be accepted and in with the people who have money and good things. Instead of relying on what she does have -- namely terrific good looks, and parents who adore her -- Delilah decides at an early age to do everything that she can to be one of the popular ones. With a bit of scheming and trolling for her best prospects, Delilah lands one Chaim Levi, a young rabbinical student who clearly adores here, but sadly, can't seem to thread his way through Delilah's schemes to have it all.
First the congretation that Chaim is 'inheriting' from his beloved grandfather isn't good enough, full of aging members who view Delilah with quite a bit of suspicion, the apartment in the Bronx isn't good enough, her mother-in-law treats her with suspicion, and even poor Chaim isn't up to scratch either. Bored and unhappy, Delilah pesters and nags, until she finds out about a community in Connecticut that has been blacklisted by every rabbi in America.
The how and why of that exclusion, and what happens when Delilah suddenly starts to find all of her dreams coming true is the turning point of this novel. Delilah, sadly, is a character that the reader can't really summon up much sympathy for. She's shallow, greedy, not very charitable, and her entire world begins and ends just beyond her nose. She doesn't have any friends, she doesn't try to keep the ones that she does have, and worst still, she tells little lies in the vain hope that it will keep people impressed with her. Even Chaim, the husband who is clearly smitten with her, and willing to do anything for her, isn't that interesting either -- I kept hoping that he would grow a spine throughout the novel.
Despite several very funny scenarios -- most amusing is the one where Delilah gives birth to a son without really knowing what is involved -- this sad novel lumbers along to a ridiculous ending. I'm not quite sure where Ragen was going with this, was it a satire on modern Orthodox life? The materialism and greed of the turn of milliennium? The end result was that it's a tragic novel, not really worth the time that it takes get through it, and despite giving it an interesting twist at the end, where it seems that everyone gets exactly what they desire, it's not a very impressive or entertaining read.
No one really grows up, except for maybe Chaim, and he's such a sad-sack of a character that you really don't care if he discovers what an immature brat that he's picked. All of the people who inhabit this story are selfish and self-absorbed, striving for another conquest in bed, or more in their upscale homes, more clothing, more shoes, more more more, that I had a nearly impossible time feeling anything. I didn't care anything at all for them, and that to me, is a fatal flaw in a story. If you really don't have a plot, and the characters who stumble about blindly, then what's the point?
It's clear that Ragen was striving for a modern adaptation of Flaubert's Emma Bovary, who hungers for passion and the grand life in provincial France, and gets none of it in her ever-increasing spiral towards self-destruction. But Delilah Goldgrab Levi can't even get that far.
Naomi Regan has written far better stories than this one, but this one is a waste of time and paper. Here's hoping that the next one is more entertaining, or at least, she learns from the mistakes that she made from this one. Two stars, and not recommended at all.
Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
I have enjoyed some of Naomi Ragen's novels in the past, particularly Jephte's Daughter, but Saturday Wife was a big disappointment. It lacked substance throughout, had needless detail, was very shallow, was filled with Jewish self-hatred, and had a very weak, disappointing ending. Many times she interrupted her narrative using straight proseto insult traditional Judaism; I had the strong impression that bashing religious Jewish life was the author's real purpose in writing this book. Had this book been written by a gentile, it would have definitely been labeled antisemitic.