SOURCE: "Migration That Leads to Self-Discovery," in Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 1998, p. 14.

[In the following excerpt, Rubin complains of the lack of plot in Rabinyan's Persian Brides, and asserts that Rabinyan's focus is on colorful descriptions instead of the narrative.]

… Only the adolescent girls featured by Israeli journalist, playwright, and poet Dorit Rabinyan in her first novel, Persian Brides, are firmly rooted in their ancestral culture. And judging from Rabinyan's vivid evocation of their fetid, cloyingly closed-in lives in the Jewish quarter of a Persian village in the early years of this century, one would have to conclude that migration is good for the soul….

A sense of vividness, a kind of larger-than-life hyperreality, may quite possibly have been what Dorit Rabinyan was aiming at in her novel, Persian Brides. Rabinyan transports us to a household in the Jewish section of a small village in Persia early in...