The Book of Longings

The Alexandrian incantation bowl, which Yaltha gifts Ana shortly before Ana’s parents tell her of the marriage that they have arranged for her, symbolizes Ana’s heroic and entirely forbidden yearning to count as an individual, for others to see and accept her as a proud and passionate woman whose dreams and longings matter as much as men’s: “To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all” (5), proclaims a 14-year-old Ana to justify the importance of her writings. The incantation bowl was a violation of Jewish tradition and considered forbidden foreign magic. Ana must conceal the bowl from her own parents. The bowl itself is a tradition that Yaltha brings from her childhood in Alexandria, where the Aramaic culture regarded women with far more respect and integrity than they received in Jewish culture. The beautiful, polished limestone bowl gives Ana the chance to inscribe in ink along the inside of the bowl her deepest secret, her deepest yearning, to “Write what’s inside you” (8), as Yaltha encourages her.

In addition to writing a sort of individual prayer, the tradition involves Ana tracing her own image in the bowl, another violation of a Jewish law that forbade graven images.