Author Alice Hoffman is known for a couple of trademarks in her novels: Strong, independent women take center stage, and day-to-day life is often colored with mysticism. A prolific writer of more than 30 books for children, teens and adults, Hoffman is a pro at creating worlds where the line between reality and magic is blurred.
Writing her latest book, however, presented a fresh challenge: What happens when “reality” is one of the most unimaginable, larger-than-life events in Jewish history?
Set in Israel in 70 C.E., during and after the fall of Jerusalem, “The Dovekeepers” tells the story of the Romans’ siege of Masada from the perspective of four extraordinary women. The novel has been lauded by authors including Toni Morrison, who called it a “major contribution” to contemporary literature.
Hoffman will read from her book and speak at the JCC of San Francisco on Monday, Oct. 17 and in Berkeley on Tuesday, Oct. 18.
Though her protagonists are imagined, the setting and sequence of events are based on intensive research, says Hoffman, who traveled to Israel twice during the five-year research and writing process. On the first of these trips, to visit family, she says she didn’t decide to write the book so much as it seemed to find her.
“I was at Masada, and I had this feeling that my grandmothers were around me,” recalls the writer, currently a visiting scholar at Brandeis University. “I was very involved with my grandmothers, who were both great Russian-Jewish storytellers. And I just felt this instant personal connection to the place.”
After researching the siege and poring over what little text exists about it, by the first-century historian Josephus, Hoffman learned that two women and five children survived the battle. From there, she began to imagine what life might have been like during the two to three months that some 900 Jews on Masada held off the Romans.
Told in four parts, the narrative gives each of Hoffman’s protagonists the chance to tell her own story. Yael’s mother died in childbirth; her father, an assassin, blamed and rejected her for it. Revka, a baker’s widow, has arrived with her traumatized grandsons after witnessing her daughter’s (and their mother’s) brutal murder by Roman soldiers. Shirah, the daughter of high priests, provides wisdom and a connection to ancient medicine and mysticism; Aziza, a warrior’s daughter, was raised as a boy and finds passion through her fighting skills.
The four do not know each other when they arrive, although as they reveal their pasts and secrets, their lives intersect in unexpected ways. Each woman in her own right is an independent, highly resilient force to be reckoned with.
“I didn’t sit down and think, ‘I’m writing a feminist novel,’ ” says Hoffman, 59, who in 2007 wrote about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. “But as a point of fact there really aren’t stories about women from ancient times, [and] there are very few women mentioned in the Bible. I felt like these were stories that hadn’t been told.”
Aside from the challenges of piecing together a believable narrative, Hoffman had to acknowledge that readers would know what was coming — that the Romans eventually took Masada, resulting in mass martyrdom. But for Hoffman, that end point was not as cut-and-dry as one might think.
“There’s a coda to the story,” she says. “For me, and I think for many of us, especially Jews, there is an end after the end. This isn’t just true devastation. It’s also a book about hope and survival.”
Alice Hoffman will read at the JCC of San Francisco, 3200 California St., S.F. at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 17. $10-$20. www.jccsf.org. Also at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 18. $36-$43. www.berkeleyarts.org.
“The Dovekeepers” by Alice Hoffman (501 pages, Scribner, $27.99)