222 r Libby Garshowitz
For an entire year Yefefia and Yemima tutor Sippor (where is Masos?),
now referred to as Masos’s wife (l. 412) in the art of love and beneficence
and fill her young heart and mind with desire and intellect (melo’ hesheq
... u-vin ll. 422, 418), recounting adventurous love tales of young gazelles
(l. 413), which they know in abundance. We know very little about Sippor
other than her brother Yoshefe’s flattering words about her as young and
chaste. Neither her husband, Masos, nor Yoshefe speak of her beauty or
her intellect, which she so admires about her tutors. We are not told about
Sippor’s transformation from ’ama to wife. We know only that Sippor’s
youth renders her sensitive and easily influenced. Now Sippor begins to
“chirp” (ll. 417–40), earning the two ladies’ praise: “Many women have
performed heroically, but you have outdone them all!”^50
But all is not as harmonious as it appears. There is a subtext here, a
new twist. Sippor’s song is different from the love songs of Yefefia and
Yemima. While Yefefia and Yemima had adapted to some kind of modus
vivendi with Yoshefe in their new love nest, they had insinuated, quite
cunningly, into their exquisite songs tales about fat, healthy gazelles
(shemenot beri’ot), jealous women (nashim meqanne’ot), women’s deceit
(me ̔ilat nashim), women hated and loved (’ahuvot senu’ot), busybod-
ies (ve-holekhot u-va’ot), and women suspected of committing adultery
(u-minhat qena’ot, ll. 413–14), common themes in Hebrew and Arabic
maqāma literature and usually recounted by men. Sippor now begins to
chirp, in rhymed verse, a rather different tune. After a full year of living in
the ménage à cinq, she bemoans her youthful bridegroom’s lack of sexual
know-how, awareness, and sophistication and begins to bewail her own
naiveté:
Wit have you taught [your] foolish maid [Sippor]
Who now knows just a little
A mind unversed in riddles and lore
Unveils an ignorant boor [Masos]
The deft knows riddles
The base his mouth proclaims
Your spirit on me is poured
And in mine is love galore
Tender and young is my beau
Filled with yearning but untested
Hitherto lovers he hates