Persian Brides, a novel by the Israeli woman writer Dorit Rabinyan, takes place in the Jewish quarter of a small Persian village ruled by cunning ghosts, devils and strong-minded women, at the turn of the twentieth century. The plot revolves around the desperate journeys of two girls/women, that of the pregnant fifteen-years-old Flora who sneaks out of her mother's house at night to look for her swindler husband who has deserted her, and that of little eleven years old Nazie, Flora's orphaned cousin, who leaves the same house at dawn to seek the local mullah's permission to marry her cousin Moussa.

The geographical and temporal location of the narrative and its focus on women's stories places it outside the hegemonic Israeli discourse. It takes place in Persia in the pre-state era and thereby no critique of the Israeli narrative is apparent and its female perspective seems to avoid the national project and the male authority over it altogether. The combination of women's issues and the oriental context at the heart of the narrative enhances a semblance of innocent marginality. It enables the hegemonic gaze of the western and male Israeli discourse to conceptualize it as a folkloristic tale, thus securing its marginality and attributing the novel's popularity to its colourful ethnicity.

However, far from being innocent, Persian Brides disguises a deep subversion when under the semblance of ethnic folklore it exposes the Orientalist nature of the Israeli discourse, rather than focusing on its particular manifestations the way other Israeli writers of Eastern origins do. The use of fantastic elements is instrumental to this subversive reading. Through them the narrative progresses from stereotypical categories of representation, which conceptualize the fantastic as ethnic folklore and consequently deepen the Orientalist East/West dichotomy, towards the presentation of the fantastic as magical realism, consequently creating a liminality and hybridity, rather than rigid categories of space and identity.

The beginning of the novel reinforces the Orientalist view of the small Persian village as ignorant, backward, sexually uninhibited and irrational via its female protagonists, whose life is determined by their bodies and mainly by their reproductive function. Thus the Orientalist view of the feminine and its heightened sensuality is enhanced.