Deschutes Public Library

Temple dancer, Amy Weintraub

eng

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novels

Temple dancer

1262767947

Amy Weintraub

Temple Dancer is a spiritual enigma that, like a double helix, entwines the lives of two women from disparate times and cultures. Through a lively and spirited life of the flesh and spirit, Wendy and Saraswati explore the divine connection--the portal that opens through spiritual practice, through the making of art, the making of love, and most of all, through love itself. In 1997, Wendy Rabin is going through a divorce and travels to India on a spiritual pilgrimage. On a crowded train, she meets Saraswati, an enigmatic older woman, who claims to have been a devadasi before the 1947 ban decimated this 1200-year-old tradition of temple dance. Fifty years later, Wendy has abandoned her art, turning her life upside down in her struggle to be a "good enough" mother. When Saraswati disappears from the train, Wendy is left with her diary and a request that Wendy honor the profaned culture by sharing her story. The professor she hires to translate the diary dies, and for nearly twenty years, it is lost. The translation mysteriously reappears in 2016, and as Wendy reads it, she is forced to reckon with her past