Nechama Sarah Gila Nadborny-Burgeman, author of The Princess of Dan, has created Sarah Danborne, a privileged child of the ’60s, who wanders through academia, America, and the world, leaving a trail of unsuitable relationships and unfulfilled hopes. On the island of Crete, she falls into a relationship with a committaphobic musician who breaks her heart. She travels to Israel where, after much soul searching, and more trips to Crete, she finds God, herself, and her soulmate.
The book then pops us into the future, where Danya has just celebrated her bat mitzvah, and is learning about the turbulent times Sarah and her generation lived through. Her grandfather tells her, “Back then, people did not know who they were and what life was really about.”
Her grandmother assures her that is no longer the case. “Now there is peace, no more suffering and each person from every corner of the world is finding his/her true place and purpose in the world. Now we all love and honor one another.” From this perspective, Danya is taught in her post-bat mitzvah class how to reach back in time through dreams and guide Sarah on her journey.
Sarah has learned that she is a member of the tribe of Dan, and she gathers all the wisdom she has learned from the Kabbala, her Hasidic teachers, and her troubled past into a handbook for women called The Princess of Dan. Danya is studying the text in her class and learns that Sarah is more than an author from long ago; Sarah is Danya in an earlier life.
The Princess of Dan weaves together Jewish theology and meditation on the nature of masculinity and femininity in a story of how liberal feminists of the late twentieth century morph into Sabbath-observant women who struggle with an attraction to and revulsion for their past. The novel is loosely based on the life of Nadborny-Burgeman, who, like her protagonist, has a degree in cultural anthropology and traveled extensively before settling in Israel. Like Sarah, the author also paints, writes, teaches, plays the harp, and uses her spiritual knowledge to hold retreats and classes for women.
So why write a novel instead of a memoir? In a phone interview, Nadborny-Burgemon told me she thought writing a novel would give her more freedom and the ability to add in characterization from other people she has known.
Sarah’s Princess of Dan text is interspersed throughout the book and printed in its entirety at the conclusion. Although attributed to the fictional Sarah, the ideas are the author’s very real conclusions developed by “observing other people’s lives and my own, to be a guide for growing and healing.” She applies these ideas to classes and retreats for women who want spiritual guidance for their problems. “All types of women come,” Nadborny-Burgeman said. “They might be confused or stuck in self-defeating patterns of behavior, or having trouble in their lives.”
One interesting notion in the text is that relationships are doomed to fail when men and women look for characteristics in each other that they should be developing in themselves. There is an exercise readers can follow to see if this has been a source of conflict in their lives, and it is one Nadborny-Burgeman actually uses. “I take people hiking through the woods and we stop and make a list of the characteristics and values of the people in our lives,” she said. “We do meditations and have interactive dialogue. It’s a whole process that builds us up.” Nadburny-Burgeman said women have claimed that her classes helped them get married or released them from “unconscious entanglements.”
As a work of fiction, The Princess of Dan is an engaging story that teaches important life lessons, but requires effort to follow with its multiple characters in two different times, and flashbacks within those times. In one dramatic scene, Sarah, unable to sleep one night, remembers how she went back to Crete on an unsuccessful mission to her obsession, the musician. She travels to India and meets Jackson, a British man who changes his plans to accompany her. They have to go through Pakistan to get a visa and discover, in the pouring rain, that there are no hotels, only campsites. A stranger persuades them to spend the night in his home, and they follow him, deeper and deeper into a jungle village. When Jackson senses danger, they flee. And after that trip, Jackson exits the story. Reflecting on this chapter from the safety of her bed in Jerusalem, Sarah thinks “Thank God I’m here. It’s truly a miracle that I escaped unharmed from so many adventures around the world.”
That is a sentiment many Baalei Teshuva share.
Sarah and her friends in Israel develop their religious identities in fits and starts. One endearing aspect of The Princess of Dan is the admission that shedding a secular lifestyle and embracing Torah Judaism can be difficult, with some backtracking in behavior or thought along the way. In the Princess of Dan text, Sarah writes, “Let us delve into the chaos of our past and courageously face ourselves in the light of the truth that is now being shown to us. A princess has humbly accepted the realization that all of life’s experiences were and are truly for the good. The sparks of her soul imprisoned in situations and relationships, and confused with human needs, are gracefully and mercifully being returned as she gains consciousness.” A good antidote to regret.
The Princess of Dan defies easy categorization. It is both a novel and a self-help book. It is a coming-of-age story that seeks to inform readers who are unfamiliar with Judaism and those with extensive knowledge. Each time a Hebrew phrase is used for the first time, the English definition is printed in parentheses.
“I didn’t want this to be just for the Jewish population,” the author said. “I wanted to reach as widespread a readership as possible, to give an important message of what Israel is about, and touch as many people as I can.”
While that is a worthwhile goal, I can’t help thinking that secular readers would be mystified by Sarah and Danya’s beliefs, and religious readers would be scandalized by Sarah’s youthful relationships with men. The prime audience for The Princess of Dan may be women like Sarah who decide to embrace a life of observant Judaism, but occasionally look back to see how far they’ve come, and be inspired to keep moving forward.
For more information about the author and her books, paintings, music, classes and retreats, visit www.NechamaSarahGila.com.
By Bracha Schwartz
