SOURCE: "The Family Honor," in New York Times, March 15, 1998, p. 27.

[In the following review, Lowenthal, an American author, praises Rabinyan's authentic detail and rich prose in Persian Brides.]

Despite the near-microscopic scrutiny to which our politicians' love lives are currently subjected, we may still be astonished to encounter a culture in which ordinary girls' sexual intimacies are known by every neighbor, mothers probe their sleeping daughters' private parts to confirm the "family honor," and a girl's first menstruation is announced from the rooftops. Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli journalist, poet and playwright, has conjured precisely such a society in Persian Brides, her lush, lyrical and disturbing first novel. Set in a Jewish community in a village in turn-of-the-century Persia, the story contrasts the experiences and aspirations of two young women: Flora, a 15-year-old pining for her deadbeat husband, a cloth merchant who ditched her with "a baby in her...