At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf
A Parisian Jewish girl is sent into hiding in the piercing Holocaust novel At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf.
Danielle packed her past away to live as Marie-Jeanne, an orphan and a good Catholic girl. In a French hamlet, she goes to church and confession, suppressing dangerous memories of Friday night prayers. Doing so, she’s told, is essential to her survival.
But there are costs to living a lie, and there’s madness in forgetting. Marie-Jeanne parrots the concerns of those looking to “purify” France, but cannot decide what she’s meant to do with loose ends: the open Judaism of her new best friend, Genevieve. Dehumanizing propaganda against Jews and other marginalized groups. The incongruity of outsiders in town, prying for secrets, then sending people away. Is her “cousin,” Luc, a nationalist or a rebel? Are the camps on the border like hotels, or are people dying there? What does it mean to choose a side, particularly when one side hates the girl you were?
Beneath the bucolic scenes of Tara Ison’s novel are foreboding realities. Neighbors turn against neighbors; fascism creeps up; “good” people avert their eyes. Danielle, suspended between worlds, yearns for the safety of the prewar days, but makes concessions to mimic peace; each time she chooses blindness over alarm, her truths slip a bit further from her grasp. Willing to compromise friends, family, and her past for the illusion of safety, she flirts with nothingness. Even at the novel’s gripping end, the question of whether she will be able to rebuild remains.
Tragedies abound in the hidden life of a Jewish girl in the historical novel At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf—and questions about what moral compromises are the acceptable cost of survival.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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