Dorit Rabinyan’s Persian Brides

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli writer whose family immigrated from Iran, a highly active author – and little known in Brazil – through a reading of her first novel, Persian Brides, published in 1995. In this novel Rabinyan focuses on Jewish life in what was then Persia, still under the rule of the Shahs, before the so-called “Islamic Revolution” of 1979. Rabinyan singles out as the novel’s main characters women from the same family, living in the Jewish community of Omerijan, a fictional village in the interior of the country. Metonymically, these women symbolize the female condition in that community, and the novel, by extension, exposes the community’s way of life, in terms that are not always favorable. The narrative focuses particularly on current marital relations and the roles reserved for men and women, employing strong language that often borders on vulgarity.