A 400-year tradition of welcoming refugees

So this week someone sent me a Smithsonian magazine, with this story in it (please do read it! I can't do it justice.) A story about the little place in France which I write about, where during World War II the local plateau farmers and townspeople went about sheltering and saving thousands of Jewish refugees as if it was the obvious thing to do. You run across stories about it here and there online, often on Holocaust memorial sites (the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has a good one,) telling what they did during the war.

Well, this one isn't about what they did during the war.

It's about what they're doing now.

Now, they are taking in refugees. Now during the worst refugee crisis since World War II, they are simply doing what it is their towns' and their region's tradition to do: offer shelter to those who need it.

If you don't know yet about the story of this place, I'll offer you here the summary I put into the historical note in Flame in the Night:

____________

In south central France there is a high, cold plateau, a hard place to farm, a hard place to keep warm through the long, bitter winters. Hundreds of years ago the Huguenots—French Protestants fiercely persecuted by Catholic kings—fled to that cold plateau and made it their own, built their homes out of the rocks, and learned to till the stony soil. For hundreds of years their descendants kept their traditions: their worship, their independence, their distrust of the government. Their memory of persecution.
And then France fell to the Nazis, and the new French government in Vichy began arresting Jews.

Writers still debate why the people of the Vivarais-­Lignon plateau hid so many Jews during World War II, but one thing is clear: they did, and it seemed normal to them. It’s said by people with memory of that time that there was a Jewish refugee in every farmhouse. They saved thousands of lives at the risk of their own, saying afterward that it was only the decent thing to do. And across the plateau, in its eleven villages, a network of pastors worked with each other and with their congregations and their neighbors to welcome refugees, hide them, feed them, provide them with false papers, and eventually (with the aid of allies Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, French and Swiss) smuggle many of them across the border into Switzerland.

___________

And they continue that tradition—local families taking in families from Congo, from South Sudan, from Syria. Teaching them French, giving them a place to breathe, to taste peace and normal life again. It's remarkably similar to what was going on there during WWII, even in that—it's not always said, but there was a huge emphasis on not only hiding the Jewish refugees but giving them (especially the children, many of them separated from their parents) enough peace and normality and hope to help them carry on. They're really doing the exact same thing they did during WWII—I've said it before and I'll say it again, they would never have saved the lives they did if they'd done it for the sake of being heroes, if they'd waited till they knew the mortal danger before taking people in—no, they weren't trying to be heroes then and they aren't now. They are simply continuing their tradition. Simply giving their neighbor what they would wish for themselves, what we all wish for: a roof over our heads, a table with friendly faces around it, a place where our children can play in peace.

It seemed normal to them then, it seems normal to them now.

God grant us such normality in our own country, in our own communities. God grant us such traditions.

It's not just a matter of granting, of course. But man, God grant us the chance.

Flame in the Night is at my house!

When I was a kid, my mental image of being an author was this: you get a big package in the mail, you open it, and there it is! Your book--dozens of it! Your author copies have arrived! You're an author!

So yeah, that's one day in an author's life (the most filmable, of course, which is why it was my mental picture!), out of approximately one thousand and thirty-six. But it is one day--and it has come!

Here's a little video of my son playing with them, facilitated by my husband (and the Boy's rather interesting notions of how libraries work!)

Book cover!

YOU GUYS I GOT MY BOOK COVER. AND I LOVE IT.

Is it weird that I love it even though Elisa would never in a million years wear that scarf? Will probably not even wear that scarf when, God willing, she is 30? But definitely never in Tanieux in 1942, because a) she is poor, everyone is poor, people made their kids' new sweaters out of the unraveled wool of old sweaters for Pete's sake, and b) the last thing she wants (or would enjoy doing) is to draw attention to herself. (Also while I'm at it I really doubt she carries a purse, however mature she is at 16 years old. Whatever. You can barely see the purse.)

But it doesn't matter, because I have learned a thing or two about book covers since my first one, and I've learned the reasons beginning authors always get frustrated at theirs--book covers are symbolic. They're not intended as a factual representation of a scene from the book. That scarf isn't even around that young woman's neck, if you really look--it simply swirls behind her, an embodiment of something, a symbol. A symbol of her indomitable spirit, the flame.

It's interesting about book covers, about illustrations too. When I read a book--or maybe this isn't so anymore, but it was very much so when I was younger--the image that's presented to me with it colors it vividly for me. I still have the vividest memories of some of the art that was used to illustrate the poetry in my senior Lit textbook--especially a very strange (well it had to be!) painting on the page opposite T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Sometimes a piece of writing without an illustration--sometimes something I wrote myself--produces a strong impression in my mind of a certain type of art. I see the images as line-drawings, or oil-paintings. The reading I wrote about Jesus' birth always makes me think of a certain painting, in which a very ordinary, humble Mary bends over the very rough and ordinary manger and a light pours upward from it, lighting her face. (I can't find it. Wish I could!) I

This isn't it but this also reminds me of Jonas & Sally

don't remember if I saw the painting before writing it or after--I like to think it was after, and I said Yes that's it! Or my friend Rich's novel Jonas and Sally--I told him this once, and I hope I expressed it well enough that it was clear this was praise--makes me see a sort of graphic-novel illustration in my mind, done with strong lines and clear watercolors, wide spaces, very fresh greens and blues.

So I kind of wonder what images Flame in the Night will raise in readers' minds, and I wonder if they'll be affected by the cover. Sometimes I imagine other covers it could have had, other images--a farm with a ancient stone barns, people walking in streets piled deep with snow, a young man on a path with the green and golden light of oak-woods around him, a group of people walking along a ridge high in the Alps. Or maybe the back of a watching Gestapo officer... (Though that might have garnered me a bunch of two-star reviews that boiled down to "I thought this was a thriller and it wasn't.") I mean some of those could have been gorgeous, yeah, but I don't care. I swear--for most of this week I've had a PDF of my cover open on my computer just so I could look at it again and again.

It's the spirit of it that's right. A book cover isn't representational--it's meant to make you feel something. (Specifically "desire to read this book," of course...) It's meant to give you a powerful instinctive sense, in a split second, of what it would be like to read this book and whether you would like it. It's meant to put a finger right on that pivot point between "meh" and "hmm..." and push down till your hand goes out toward the book and you flip it over to read the back. And to achieve this there's a whole silent language of form and color, which I don't fully understand, but a little better than I used to--I understand now why putting a bright color into a black-and-white image is so different from putting a pastel color in. That's what (after looking at a whole bunch of WWII book covers) I ended up  suggesting to the cover designer, and that's what they ran with, with a ton of style. I think what this cover communicates is that this book will be striking. And I think (well, it's just my personal opinion!) that that's true.

A lightly color-washed example

Incidentally there are some really, well, interesting ramifications to that split-second factor in cover design. One of them is racism. I ran across this concept (there's a fair amount of blogging about it, because to anyone who sees a large sampling of book covers in the course of their work it's pretty obvious) a few years back; here's a good sample post about it. To boil it down: most publishers are afraid that if we white people people see a black person or other person of color on a book cover, we'll pivot toward "meh, not for me." That though none of us would admit to not wanting to read about people who look different from us, we have instincts which, in that split second of "do I want to give this book a chance?", will lose them money if they put too much melanin on the cover. So they have all kinds of dodges, from actually changing the character's race on the cover (NOT COOL, publishers!) down to little techniques to make the character's race less obvious: weird lighting, weird angles, silhouettes, even fading everything out into sepia or some other color-wash so that if you look closely you'll see a person of color but at least it won't jump out at you in that crucial split second. A bunch of those individual decisions could be very well defended (come on, that's a gorgeous, artful silhouette, come on, portraying the fight from above looks amazing) but it is awfully... interesting the sheer overwhelming proportion of times this happens to these types of books--whereas no U.S. publisher ever turned a hair at putting an attractive white girl on the cover.

Well. I'm doing WWII Europe, so I didn't really have to face that particular question. Though I'll note that as far as attractive white (Jewish) girls go, Elisa is actually not pretty. She has bad acne and also much more urgent things to think about. But then the cover doesn't tell you if she's pretty or not. It tells you that her back is straight and her spirit is strong and bright, that the darkness around cannot quench the life within her.


So yeah. I'll take it. And say THANK YOU!

Eowyn and the feminism of all things that grow

Do you remember the first time you read Lord of the Rings? Do you remember when you first learned (and was it a shock?) that Eowyn had ridden in secret to battle before the gates of Gondor? I remember.

I was just a kid making a puzzle on the floor, as my Dad read us the entire trilogy, night after night after supper--it must have taken years!--and I was listening with all my heart. Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey, the Witch-King hissed, and Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!

And Dernhelm laughed a clear laugh like the ring of steel. No living man am I! he said.

And I thought, Oh no, he's some kind of undead!

(Yep, that's me--paragon of feminine and writerly intuition.)

I realized my mistake pretty quickly, of course. Eowyn stepped forth and I was swept up in wonder. Tolkien gives us such vivid images (not nearly equaled in the movie, to my sorrow): Still she did not blench (as the great beast strikes at her): maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair yet terrible. A swift stroke she dealt... A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.

From that time--unless it was even earlier--I loved Eowyn. That never changed. But on this reading (I'm listening to the audiobook as I garden this fall) I noticed something I had never noticed before.

At the end of her story Eowyn changes. (This is not the new thing. I'm getting there.) She comes to the brink of despair after her great battle, heals slowly and finds a man whom she can love, and she makes a choice and changes her life.

Then the heart of Eowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her.

"I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun," she said; "and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren." And again she looked at Faramir.

There are those who feel that this moment destroys her as a strong character, that Tolkien is relegating her to "a woman's proper place"--that by becoming a wife, (and presumably mother,) and a healer rather than a fighter, she becomes proper and feminine and acceptable. She becomes small. It's the view that changing from a warrior to a healer is a demotion. That serving life, rather than death, is a demotion.

Some people call that feminism.

I am a feminist. I rather think I was born one. I have never, not once, been able to stomach the view that a man is more important than a woman. And fundamentally that's what feminism means to me: equality between men and women. I'm told the term is falling out of fashion, that young women no longer call themselves feminists for fear of being labeled man-haters; I don't agree with this trend and will not bow to it. But there's something else I can't stomach, and that's the equation of violence with importance. The idea that nothing is to be more admired than the ability to kill. The idea that Eowyn's life becomes pitiful when she lays down her sword.

And Tolkien agrees; I only realized on this reading just how explicitly Tolkien agrees.

It comes in Faramir's talk with Frodo, as they sit together in the secret caves behind the waterfall in Ithilien. As their conversation ranges across many things, Faramir begins to speak of the culture of Gondor, its roots and the changes that have come to it. In their lore, he explains, they reckon three races of Men (and stay with me here, because I may talk about the problems inherent in this sometime but it won't be today): the High, the Middle, and the Wild. The Numenoreans or men of the West, the founders of Gondor, are the High; but the Rohirrim are reckoned among the Middle Peoples.

Yet now, says Faramir, if the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us, enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scarcely claim any longer the title High. We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts. Such is the need of our days. So even was my brother Boromir; a man of prowess, and for that he was accounted the best man in Gondor.

...And favored above himself, Faramir does not add, by their father--and by others. Someone else (I believe it's one of Faramir's men) later comments that as a man who loves learning more than war, Faramir is less respected than his brother by most people in Minas Tirith; but the men who serve under him love him. And there's no doubt his creator does too. This is the man who refuses the Ring, though (even besides its terrible inherent pull) he knows how much his lord and father wants it. He passes the ultimate test. I knew that--but it had passed me by, until this time, just how much Faramir is meant by Tolkien to be a representative of Numenor, of all that is "highest" in human culture. A fictional culture, of course. He couldn't use a real one, to represent the ideal. That does not exist.

Rohan, on the other hand, is a real culture--one that Tolkien loved and admired, but with reservations. It is absolutely the culture of the Angles and Saxons, transposed from the sea onto wide grassy plains and onto horses, speaking the same Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) that my first college English class twisted our tongues around trying to read Beowulf. (Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and knew the culture and its sagas intimately.) It struck me vividly, this time, just how much that culture glorifies battle--in a deeply attractive way, full of bleak but blinding beauty and pathos.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into Shadow.

Eowyn, as we first meet her, embraces her culture wholly, even as she burns to break free of the darkness and dishonor she feels her royal house has sunk to in the days of Wormtongue and the weakness of Theoden. She speaks of battle in the same glorious, steel-bright terms as any man of Rohan, and the word renown is often on her lips. Only one fault does she find with her culture: that it does not allow her the same chance at great deeds as the men. All your words, she says to Aragorn when he speaks of valor without renown in the last defense of her people, are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. Though Aragorn is not wrong to praise it, valor without renown is not what is offered to her brother, and she will not have it for herself. In this she is just; she is, after all, his equal and more. Though it's not right for her to abandon her post as leader of her people in hiding at Dunharrow, it struck me this time that she begs to ride with Aragorn after she has failed to convince him to ride another way--she begs to go with him on the Paths of the Dead. The very mention of that place fills absolutely every rider of Rohan with abject terror, including the king and Eomer, who beg Aragorn not to go. Eowyn is braver than her brother.

She also, we are told, goes seeking death. Oppressed and darkened in her heart by her long role as "dry-nurse" to a shamefully weakened king, by being shut in the house with Wormtongue's whisper always in her ear, by the great change Gandalf works bringing liberation to--it seems--everyone but her, she sets her heart and her love on Aragorn as her hope for a larger life. A life (as Aragorn says later) "of glory and great deeds, and lands far from the fields of Rohan." When he rejects her, she has nothing left to fall back on, and in her despair she takes her culture's way out: she will die in battle, gloriously.

But she does not die. She does the great deed she has always hoped to do, with the help of a humble hobbit, and she lives, though sick with the Black Breath, in the darkness of her mind with her vision of her future empty before her. She is healed. She meets Faramir. I stand upon some dreadful brink, she tells him, and it is utterly dark in the abyss before my feet, but whether there is any light behind me I cannot tell. For I cannot turn yet.

Then the wind changes, and Shadow passes, and the Eagle comes out of the East crying the news that the Ring is destroyed and peace is come again to Middle-Earth.

And she turns.

I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.

Not take joy only in the songs of slaying. This is the very thing Faramir said about the deterioration of his own culture, which he still hopes to reverse: that only war and warriors are admired.

This, then, is the change Eowyn makes when she turns from her darkness towards Faramir: she lets go of the culture she was raised in, the culture of glory and death. She makes her choice, and she stands with a man who does not desire to be a king, but to go "dwell in fair Ithilien and there make a garden." (It's not for nothing that Faramir earlier says to Frodo and Sam, with great respect--even with awe, and because they were the only ones able to carry the Ring and not to use it--Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour.) She is a hero, and has killed a being second only to the Dark Lord in power and evil; she has fulfilled the greatest dream of any warlike Middle Man; she is free now to choose the High. Which paradoxically is also the humble. Gardening. Healing, and all things that grow.

Tolkien names as High the cultures that honor and do not disdain those things of peace and nurture that are traditionally the woman's realm.

I am a feminist. But I have the same uneasiness about my own culture, and (at least sometimes) feminism within it, that Faramir confesses to about Gondor. So often, "feminism" in movies is an attractive young woman felling a dozen men with karate moves or guns. So often, fans are quick to scorn a female character who is insufficiently prepared to hurt people, or to consider her demoted if she marries or (worse) has children, or consider her ill-treated by her creators if she is not put in harm's way and allowed to show off a few moves. (Have we now experienced so much false and choreographed violence--and so little real--that lethal fighting appears to us to be the best part of life?) As if violence were the only kind of strength.

But this is feminism to me: not only that women should be admitted to the realm of the traditionally masculine, but also that men should learn to honor the traditionally feminine as it deserves. Who will care for all things that grow--children, gardens, human bodies, homes, the earth? Some people answer "unpaid women," others "low-wage workers." There is no good answer till we learn to say "all of us as we can, in honor and in love." There is no good world till men cease to think themselves "above" the profound and humble work of life, till all people cease to think the work of death is better. Yes, the glass ceiling is wrong. The worship of money and power, and the dismissal and overriding of the vulnerable of the earth, is worse. But these things are tied to each other. Till we stop shoving off the tedious work of care onto "unimportant" people we do not honor for it--whether it's women or the poor--till we cease to scorn or condescend about the care of small things that grow, we can never be equal. And we can never be free.

So that's my dream, I guess. The feminism of all things that grow. It believes in equal rights and in the right of women to use their gifts in every place and way that men do--to share fully in the work that is called "real" in our society. But it does not stop there or accept that so-called reality. In the end its dearest wish is not to take women away from home so much as to bring men back there, working together in equality to make it a place of life. It honors gardeners. It honors the giving and preserving of life, and all things that grow. It honors and does not scorn the uncounted millions of traditional women whose main work in life has been to nurture other human beings and help them survive--and men the same. (I think for instance of subsistence farmers, their work as repetitious, full of care, and ignored by the so-called great as any housewife's.) It honors love and respect, kindness and humility, and a Man who kneels and washes other people's feet.

For thus spake Ioreth, wisewoman of Gondor: The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.

__________________

Image credits, in order:

Eowyn fighting the Nazgul: Cory Godbey
Eowyn versus the Witch-King: grantgoboom.deviantart.com
Eowyn of Rohan: lariethene.deviantart.com
Eowyn with sword: New Line Cinema
The Healing of Eowyn: the Hildebrant brothers
Eowyn and Faramir kiss on the walls: Catherine Chmiel

The Ballad of the White Horse

It's the longest poem I've ever read--and enjoyed from beginning to end. The Ballad of the White Horse--G.K. Chesterton's epic poem about King Alfred re-conquering England from invading Danes--is more than 2,500 lines long.

And it's wonderful.

Welcome to another edition of "here is a thing I love, maybe you'd enjoy it too." I know people don't go in for epic poetry so much anymore. I have a book of Chesterton's poems--which I love--and it was years before I took the plunge and actually read the 80 pages of it that were the Ballad. But there's another way. Epic poetry was meant to be listened to. There are recordings out there--free ones. (More on that in a minute.) For an audiobook, the Ballad of the White Horse is actually quite short! I've listened to it three or four times by now while gardening. It always give me a boost.

Chesterton is an old-fashioned poet, in my favorite way. People mostly don't even know he wrote poetry, it's in a style that's so unfashionable today--but I love it. Ringing, rolling stanzas of iambic pentameter that thump and rock under you like a galloping horse; images clear and bright in heraldic colors... or primary colors, as we call most of them now... Yeah, it's not subtle, but he can write an incredible stanza:

Not for me the vaunt of woe;
Was I not from a boy
Vowed with the helmet and spear and spur
To the blood-red banner of joy?

So the Ballad is about a time when the Danes (in the poem they're sometimes called pirates--if I understand rightly these were not technically Vikings but close enough) had invaded England and driven the Anglo-Saxon tribes off most of their lands. Alfred the king of Wessex was still fighting them, but it looked hopeless. Alfred is a bit of a figure of legend in England--there's quite a bit that isn't known for sure (though a lot surer than, say, Arthur--he definitely did exist!) and Chesterton feels free to weave his own heroic, idealized version and cast Alfred as defending civilization against the dark age that came with the fall of Rome.


And there was death on the Emperor
And night upon the Pope;
And Alfred, hiding in deep grass
Hardened his heart with hope.

Alfred soon hits his lowest point--a "conquered king" driven off his lands completely, taking refuge on an island in a river--and just at the moment when he concludes that "God has wearied of Wessex men" and is now on the side of the Danes, everything changes.

In the midst of a childhood memory that follows on his despair, he looks up stunned with a strange sense that the world has changed when he wasn't looking:


Fearfully plain the flowers grew
Like a child's book to read,
Or like a friend's face seen in a glass;
He looked, and there Our Lady was,
She stood and stroked the tall live grass
As a man strokes his steed.

(Mary plays a big role in the poem; Chesterton was Catholic. I love that image of her stroking the grass.)

Alfred asks her if he will ever win England back from the Danes. She tells him this is the one thing he cannot lawfully be told; that pagans seek sure knowledge of the future, but Christians are not allowed to know it and must instead rely on courage, faith and hope. Then she says:

I tell you nought for your comfort,
Yea, nought for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?

It's a little hard to analyze these words. (They weren't--nor is any of Chesterton's poetry--meant to be analyzed. They were meant to ring like music, or steel.) What do those last two questions actually mean? What I know is, the stanzas function as a challenge. It's worse than ever. What will you do? Do they stir you? They stir me.

(It's said that during both World Wars the Ballad was immensely popular. It was apparently so much part of public consciousness in the U.K. that twice during World War II newspaper headlines were simply quotes from it. One, after a great defeat, was "Nought for your comfort.")

They stir Alfred's allies too. When he seeks out three local leaders--a Saxon, a Roman, and a Celt--to ask them to gather their troops for another fight, all three of them refuse at first. The Celtic chieftain says that Alfred's people keep prophesying a victory that never comes, and Alfred replies that he has no such prophesy this time: "The thing I bear is a lesser thing, but comes in a better name." He quotes Mary's words--which set the man's heart on fire. The hosts gather for battle.

There's a lot more. Alfred spies out the Danish camp pretending to be a harper and sings a song identifying his cause with the White Horse of Uffington, a prehistoric chalk shape cut into the turf of a great hill; because his people cherish and maintain the Horse despite not even knowing who made it, he says, and because the invaders have instead let it go to ruin, he knows God will be on their side--the side of care and love of all things, not carelessness and destruction. Then comes the battle, with many moments that ringingly dramatize faith and persistence and hope. (And, a little anachronistically, democracy.) Should I tell you how the battle ends?

Maybe you can guess. But it's worth a listen.

You can find it here at Librivox--ah, Librivox my old friend. I've gotten so many hours of wonderful listening there. Classics and books I'd never heard of--all older works, in the public domain now--read and uploaded by volunteers and available entirely for free. Have a look round. I may post something myself there one day. Shouldn't say more yet.

Here's a little preview embedded--the section I quoted from:

And, for fun, here is the trailer for, apparently, a movie someone is making of it. Very much a homemade movie, but it's kind of fun:

And the whole darn thing embedded from Youtube, just in case that's the way you'd like to play it:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.

Let's pray for everyone the sea and sky threaten today.

Book review: A Wolf in the Soul

Hi friends, not much today for the New Year, no long thoughtful posts on resolutions or the meaning of the year or anything. I just thought I'd recommend you the book I'm re-reading.

Do you enjoy the strange? Would you like to learn about an unfamiliar culture through a novel packed with humor, strange coincidences, and an unpredictable plot? Or do you perhaps already have a particular interest in or familiarity with Orthodox Judaism... or werewolves?

If any of these apply, pick up A Wolf in the Soul. Gregor Samstag (pun intended) finds an unexpected transformation occurring in his body and his soul. Strange dogs follow him throughout the city... he falls asleep unexpectedly in public places and dreams of hunting down elk and eating them raw... also his parents' marriage is falling apart and it's very complicated for him. And his new roommate at Columbia is the weirdest and refuses to eat animal products unless they're invertebrates. Eventually the "animalistic forces" pursuing Gregor catch up with him: he's bitten by an actual werewolf and begins to transform, and it's up to him to conquer the transformation by re-connecting with his Judaism and finding the right path to connect the animal with the spiritual & bring wholeness to his life.

I may not be representing that last bit quite right; I'm halfway through my re-reading and don't quite remember what really does it for him. I do remember there's a thoughtful exploration of the difference between self-discipline and legalism (legalism makes the wolf problem worse instead of better) and of the meaning of civilization and wildness. On that second count there are definitely some flaws--some of the descriptions of wolf life that he sees in his dreams are definitely inaccurate, like a wolf father physically attacking his son's family to the point of killing his own grandcubs, which I'm positive wolves never do--and this goes along with (or stems from?) an overly negative view of wildness. Still, it's a thoughtful and compelling book with realistic and striking characters, and I find it really fascinating how it has a definite religious perspective (or even agenda?) yet doesn't have anything like the heavy, cloying feel that agenda-driven Christian fiction tends to have.

Also for those interested in such things, there is apparently a genuine Jewish tradition about werewolves. I barely know anything about it so I won't try to inform you, but what I do know is that Benjamin is supposed by some to have been a werewolf. Yep! Gonna leave it at that because that's all I know. Also this book has some kabbalah references but I only know that because it says so on the back.

I partly picked this up because "Jewish werewolf novel" sounded way too interesting, and partly because I've been trying to explore traditional & Orthodox Judaism for the past couple years, ever since I established that a major character in A Flame in the Night, my work-in-progress, is a very observant Jew. I'd heard some criticism about the Jewish characters in my first book, How Huge the Night, and on reflection it was very true: I didn't know enough, treated their faith very generically, and didn't try deeply to understand their own experience of it. Christian familiarity with the Hebrew Bible does not equal familiarity with Judaism, but we too easily assume that it does. So I've gone on a deliberate quest to do better in this one. I've gone to non-fiction sources for facts, of course, but I've been trying to look at Jewish fiction as well, and well... combining learning with werewolves? I couldn't pass that up, and I'm glad I didn't.