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What I've done in the book is represen- tative of the things that peo- ple told ma The real husband used to dress impeccably, and was harsh and inflexible. She wanted to work and he wouldn't let her; she wanted to go to the movies and he said no. Whatever she wanted to do he said no. "After she committed suicide her father came to Israel to prevent her husband from inheriting anything the girl left behind. She was from a very wealthy family and everything (the couple had) came from (her parents). The father went to court to prove that the husband had driven his wife to suicide. He had let- ters that she had left around the apartment saying, 'My husband is not to inherit anything.' But the court ruled that since she hadn't signed the letters, there was no proof that she had written them. and the husband inherited everything. "That really made me angry," Ragen continues. "I wanted to bring her back to life and to right the wrong. There were rumors at the time that she was crazy. But I could imagine a situation where somebody could be pushed to the brink like that, and I tried to explore it in fic- tion." She spent three years writing the book, working evenings and Sundays. Her husband, who was her only manuscript reader, was sup- portive throughout. Her children, on the other hand, reacted the way many children might act upon hear- ing that their mother was writing a book. "Actually," Ragen laughs, "my kids didn't even look up when I told them I was writing a book. They just said, 'Yeah, Mom. You're always writing something.' "I said, 'It's going to be a bestseller. You'll see.' They humored her for the duration, but didn't really get excited until she sold it. Then, there was mass hysteria. Ragen was a little con- cerned while writing the book about revealing what amounts to "insider" infor- mation about the Orthodox community, and about paint- ing some unflattering por- traits of people within that community. "I had a lot of misgivings, and am not 100 percent hap- py with everything I said about Haredim. I'm a little ashamed at how harsh the characters are. If I did it over, I think I would down-peddle it, or pick a different topic," she says. Yet everyone she knows in the Orthodox community who has read the book liked it very much, she says. "It's very popular and I think the reason for this is because it had such positive things to say about Israel. There hasn't been a book out recently, that I know of, that says such good things about Jerusalem and about Jews in general." Religion is actually the main value of the book, and the point at which it departs from typical genre romance writing. "One of the things that is most valid about Bathsheva and David (the man with whom she falls in love)," Ragen says, "is their belief in God." As a writer in the Orthodox community, Ragen is a lone wolf. She knows only one other author in the com- munity. With the success of her first book to buoy her, Ragen is now hard at work on her sec- ond, writing in the morning hours until her son finishes kindergarten. "This one is so slow," she says of her writing. "The other one was so fast, but this is like pulling teeth. Every day I take it out and re-write it." The success of Jephte's Daughter has brought some new comforts to the Ragen household. It allowed them to build a new addition to their home, specifically a writing studio for Naomi. But more important than that, Ragen feels, is that the book made believers of her children. "It made them understand that you can have a dream, work for it, and it can come true. And that's a wonderful lesson to teach children, I think." ❑ Kim Zetter is a free-lance writer in Israel.