In her new novel, Louise Domaratius weaves verses from the Book of Esther and Arabic poetry with sensational newspaper headlines and her own experiences in France, creating a romantic fabric that holds significant messages about cultural conflict, love, hate and tolerance.
“Writing the Book of Ester,” set in present-day southern France and Iran, is about Ester Asqari, a Jewish Iranian journalist and widowed mother of 18-year-old half-Jewish twins, Mehdi and Zahra.
Ester’s story is told through the eyes of Celia Davis, a non-Jewish American teaching English at a French school. Ester’s son Mehdi is her student and soon becomes her lover. Taking inspiration from his stories about his mother and from the Bible, Celia portrays an idealized, but believable and sympathetic heroine in Ester.
Celia draws parallels between Queen Esther, Jewish wife of King Ahasuerus of Persia, and Mehdi’s liberal and feminist mother, who took the name Ester as “an affectionate nickname, a wink at Queen Esther and her palace helpers” who saved Persian Jews from annihilation in the sixth century BCE.
Ester is imprisoned for “disparaging the sacred order of the Islamic Republic,” but is released when the charge proves groundless. Then, she uses her professional connections to free her cousin, imprisoned on the similarly trumped-up charge of spying for Israel.
Anti-Semites persecute the Asqari twins in Iran. After Mehdi was attacked and injured in a student riot, their mother sent them to France.
There his sister Zahra, anxious to shed her Jewish identity, bleaches her hair, calls herself “Sandra,” and claims to be Italian. Desperate for friendship, she hangs around the “Martel’s Men,” a neo-Nazi group led by a young man named Karl, whom she loves despite his tirades against “the mongrels,” a category into which he sweeps both Muslims and Jews. In one of the novel’s humorous developments, Mehdi tries to educate and enlighten the loutish Karl, only to have the youth fall in love with him instead of his sister.
Zahra finds herself drawn into the group’s desecration of a war memorial and is subsequently questioned by the police. At the novel’s climax, some of Martel’s Men shove Mehdi into the Loire River. Its ending is in the romantic tradition, with self-revelation, confession and repentance leading to tolerance, one of the author’s main themes.
Domaratius, an American Presbyterian like Celia, lives in France, where she has had a long career as a teacher. Her style in “Writing the Book of Ester” is lyrical, vivid and flexible.
“Writing the Book of Ester” by Louise Domaratius, (293 pages, Quality Words in Print, LLC, $21.95).