But, I already knew the story at that point I remember when they told me, I wasn’t surprised. I had heard it in - this is so bizarre - Quaker meetings, a few times when I was 7. There were endless things that kept drawing me towards her story, and all the different parts of it.ĭid you learn the story of Noah’s Ark growing up? I wanted to get to know her, and how she would’ve survived, and I wanted to offer her ways of escape and see what she would do with them. I got really attached to the idea of the woman that would’ve been the wife and the mother and the person who had to survive all of that. Looking at what that would’ve meant to the adults involved, given the task of being with every animal on earth, on an ark, for over a year… it just sounded hopeless and terrifying and noisy and sickening.

I couldn’t believe in re-reading it how much of the story of the ark I hadn’t understood it hadn’t really made it through to me that it was over a year that they were stuck on that ark. I was re-reading Genesis for a poetry project I was working on. What led you to want to tell Naamah’s story? We had the opportunity to chat with Sarah Blake about Naamah, matriarchs, feminist retellings, and how she never wants to break a reader’s heart.

But Judaism - outside of Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community – doesn’t recognize the Book of Jubilees as canonical).

In the novel, Blake has named her Naamah (she chose the name from the Book of Jubilees, an ancient text that tells the same stories that are in Genesis, but with greater detail Noah’s wife, in this telling, is named Na’amah. In Naamah, Blake reclaims the tale of Noah’s wife, who goes nameless in the Bible.

Naamah a novel