Product Description

One girl, one nation, one chance ...Esther's story is one of the most dramatic in the Bible: a renowned beauty, she used her feminine wiles to capture the heart of a king and so win the deliverance of her people from the threat of death. "The Gilded Chamber" creatively re-works the famous story to show us how this young girl came to be in the harem of King Xerxes and how her path to womanhood enabled her to save a nation and find peace. This is a tale of strength, seduction and survival, of the solidarity of women, and its descriptions of the Persian palace and the secrets contained within those walls will hold you spellbound to the final page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #607610 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-26
• Format: Bargain Price
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
What The Red Tent did for Dinah, The Gilded Chamber, a first novel by Rebecca Kohn, might do for Esther, the woman who wielded power over a King. The story follows the Book of Esther very closely: Xerxes banishes his wife Vashti and sets about finding a new wife by claiming all the young virgins in the kingdom of Persia for his perusal and delectation. Esther, born Hadassah, is a young Jewish orphan, remanded to the custody of her cousin Mordechai, to whom she is betrothed. Mordechai attends to the King at the Palace, but no one knows that he is a Jew. He warns Hadassah to take the name Esther when she is swept up by the King's edict, and not to reveal her heritage.

After a year of being pampered by court slaves, Esther is presented to the King. He is instantly smitten and makes her his Queen. sther longs for Mordechai but succumbs to the blandishments of the King to save herself from being sent to the soldiers--a horrible fate. In the course of Palace intrigue, Haman, a truly evil man who is viewed as a trusted servant of the King, plots to kill Mordechai, who will not bow to him, and ultimately to kill all the Jews in the Kingdom. King Xerxes, a bit of a buffoon both in the Bible and in Kohn's book, is languishing under the effects of idleness and too much wine. He gives Haman his signet ring; Haman drafts the edict which will result in the death of the Jews and seals it with the King's ring. Now, Esther must save her people.

The portent of this book is found not in the story alone, but in the meticulous research that Kohn has done into the time: Palace life, social customs, history, sexual practices, the place of women, war and politics. Descriptions of the care given to Esther before she meets the King are detailed: her trips to the hairdressers, her hennaed hands, the pungent oils rubbed all over her body, the gold-trimmed clothing she wears. She describes her dinner with a eunuch: "Golden cups in the shape of tulip blossoms were filled with sweet spiced wine from Hodu, and shining silver platters were piled high with meat stews and succulent birds I could not identify. A plate of sugared almonds and pistachios ... and a sweet of sesame, dates and honey..." She is willing to sacrifice all creature comforts to save her people; her success is celebrated to this day in the Jewish feast of Purim. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
In this measured, eloquent retelling of Jewish heroine Esther's rise from orphanhood to queen of the Persian empire, Kohn brings psychological nuance and stately elegance to the ancient biblical tale that is the basis for the Jewish holiday of Purim. Narrating in the first person, Esther (born Hadassah) tells how she is forcibly taken from her home to the royal harem of King Xerxes in Babylon. Her uncle Mordechai, a high-ranking treasury official in the king's service, warns her, "Do not reveal your people or your kindred.... Let yourself be known only as Esther, foster daughter of Marduka the Babylonian." The novel is by and large faithful to the biblical account and often quotes from it verbatim. Yet Kohn deftly fills the gaps and resolves the ambiguities in the Book of Esther with creative storytelling and historical research. As Esther recognizes her strengths and responsibilities and learns the ways of the palace, so do we; the oppressive closeness of the harem ("the lingering odors of perfume, food, and lamp oil"), the pervasive abuse, the fragile alliances and deadly schemes all come to life. Kohn's Esther has a will of steel and knows how to manipulate lusty, impetuous Xerxes, but she longs for a simpler life. Her sacrifices are finally rewarded when the king's trusted courtier Haman issues a decree ordering the slaughter of the Jews, and Esther is in a position to be able to save her people. Though the novel's pace slows at times, Kohn paints a convincing, complex picture of Esther, and her descriptions of the palace and its secrets will hold readers spellbound.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
With the success of The Red Tent (1997), the women of the Bible became fair game for writers of historical fiction. This novel about Esther is grounded in its biblical source material even as it twists a tale all its own. Esther's story is evocatively and sensuously told. Adhering closely in outline to the biblical book of Esther, the basis for the Jewish holiday of Purim, first-novelist Kohn embellishes the material with plenty of erotic detail from Esther's life in the chamber of concubines, where she awaits her moment to be deflowered by King Xerxes. This seems like a well-crafted embellishment of a familiar story. Kohn makes the most of the inherent drama and romance in the Esther saga: a young woman sacrificing herself to save her people, complete with plenty of palace intrigue and decadence. There's a little bit of every genre here, from suspense to adventure to romance to women's fiction. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A Great Story...But A Somewhat Flawed Narrative
I was ambivalent about rating and reviewing Rebecca Kohn's "The Gilded Chamber." It really had very little impact on me and, frankly, it left me flat - which surprised me. The story of Queen Esther is one of the most exciting parts of the Old Testament/Tanakh. The journey of the orphaned Jewish girl chosen in a nationwide beauty contest to become the wife of Xerxes I, and Queen of Persia, who ultimately saves her people from annihilation, is extraordinary. It emphasizes the miracle of Jewish survival over the millennia and is rich in religious significance. I found this novel somewhat flawed and not powerful enough to do justice to this great story. However, Ms. Kohn's narrative, although it deviates from the original story, is fluid and she does entertain and inform. For these reasons I believe the book is worth reading

Many have compared "The Gilded Chamber" to Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent." The only similarities I find are that both books deal with important women from the Old Testament. Ms. Diamant's novel of Dinah, Jacob's only daughter, is powerful, gritty, earthy, tragic and extremely original. There is little written in the Bible about Dinah, so much of the novel is based on the author's creativity and imagination. Rebecca Kohn's novel of Queen Esther, is a somewhat literal retelling of The Book Of Esther, although the role of Mordechai is much less significant here. Oddly, Mordechai is Esther's unrequited love interest, rather than her uncle. I don't understand the role change, as it really doesn't enhance the story. Why does Esther continue to have romantic feelings about the seemingly asexual Mordechai - especially when he does not reciprocate her feelings? Also, I would think that the historical Esther would have had to have been an extremely strong woman to accomplish what she did, let alone to survive in the court of Xerxes. Kohn's Esther comes across as a woman of little depth. She is subservient, dependent, and docile much of the time. I was unable to determine what her feelings were for her husband, Xerxes.

Much of "The Gilded Chamber" is set in a harem and affords the reader with a glimpse of life among the pampered concubines. I thought Esther's experience living amongst a group of women, confined to closed quarters, to be somewhat superficial. There is much emphasis on luxurious beauty treatments, silks and other finery, lavish jewelry, and occasional power struggles and little about relationships or about what the queen did on a daily basis beside beautify herself. What did she think? What did she do that had meaning - before and after she pled for the lives of her people?

While many of the main characters are Jewish, no one seems particularly devout not do they observe Jewish laws. Mordechai is not a practicing Jew and he encourages Esther to follow his lead in this. The characters are very one dimensional - the good are very, very good, and the bad are just plain evil. I would have liked the author to have given them much more depth.

That said, I do recommend reading "The Gilded Chamber" because, as I wrote earlier, it's a great story and Ms. Kohn writes it well.
JANA

Beautiful
I couldn't put this one down! one of the best reading experiences I had in a long, long time, I really felt connected and sympathetic to Esther and her situation, Very well written, A Rich and involving Book I RECOMMEND IT WARMLY!!!

Delightful, entertaining, NOT like the Red Tent and that's a good thing
A quote on the front of my copy of this book compares this novel to The Red Tent and Memoirs of a Geisha. Thankfully, I found it more like the latter than the former. It is like The Red Tent in that the underlying story is found in the Old Testament, but while The Gilded Chamber does take a few liberties with the Old Testament account (particularly the apocryphal account if you are familiar with that) the essence of the biblical account remains mostly intact. In other words, Esther and Mordecai remain at their core monotheistic Jews trying to survive in a hostile religious environment. Yes, they make compromises but in the end they remain religious Jews. In contrast, The Red Tent completely changes the religion of the main characters and turns the lives of the Jewish patriarchs into pagans or blithering monotheistic idiots. Yes, there is a lot of sex and sexual politics in all of the novels mentioned but it is not gratuitous. These are essential elements for understanding the lives and politics of a world that is unlike anything most sheltered American women would ever have to endure. Like Memoirs does for the closed Japanese world of the Geisha, The Gilded Chamber does for the life of women in an ancient Persian harem with a rich tapestry of cultural details. It speculates on what Esther might have had to endure to simply survive in a world where one's worth rested soley on the kings' favor. In a way, Esther faced choices similar to that of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof....how much can you compromise and remain true to what you believe? Too often, we view the story of Esther through our modern western eyes as a kind of ancient Cinderella tale. The truth was probably far from a happy-ending-type fairy tale. I particularly liked that the narrative did not end with the events told about in the Bible but speculated on Esther's life to the time of Xerxes' death and her escape from the harem as Vashti's son was crowned king.

I learned something from the notes at the end of the book. Apparently there is a tomb in Iran called The Tomb of Mordecai and Esther. Wouldn't it be something if the two were reunited at the end?