Micah Publications publishes books on Jewish vegetarian, Jewish topics and animal rights. Roberta Kalechofsky, author and publisher.

BODMIN, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years

by Roberta Kalechofsky

pbk. 450 pgs

Description

The story takes place in the year that the Black Death came to England, 1349. However, it reflects the span of years from 1290, when the Jews were expelled from England, to 1349. Many of those alive in 1349 remember 1290, because memory is an operative part of a character's personality. In its broader aspects, the book is about the relationship between Christians and Jews in the monastic culture in which Jews served king and church as usurers in the ambiguous position of "servants of the treasury," a position of semi-slaves who lived social and religious autonomous lives among themselves.

It is a compelling work of the religious and historical imagination. Cynthia Ozick called it "...an amazing work!"

ISBN 0-916288-24-2

Reviews

"In her lively historical novel, the author...examines life from 1260-1349, including the Black Death years. The first half of the story follows Will, a York peasant who flees an apparently happy marriage for a monastery after discovering that his wife, Miriam, may be Jewish. The second part accompanies Miriam as she wanders through England and the continent, searching for her true lineage. Kalechofsky limns a realistic portrait of the lives of Christian peasants (heavily taxed and tithed, they are forced into serfdom and intense poverty), monks (their powerful position, less-than-holy methods of making money and their rituals) and Jews (their indispensable but unsavory position as moneylenders, their brutal persecution by individual Christians and European feudal governments), as well as the devasting yet equalizing effect of the Black Plague on the various groups. The skillful novel is grounded in well-documented data and provides a fascinating glimpse of the rich, religious heritage of both Christians and Jews."

Publishers' Weekly

"...a masterful work. Language here is a powerful and highly original cognitive instrument, surpassing Eco's The Name of The Rose. I have seldom encountered a contemporary American author as responsive to broad, fundamental historical issues...."

Mario Materassi, editor of Henry Roth's Notebooks

"Kalechofsky has delved deeply into church records, account books and letters of the time; every sentence in her book is grounded in little-known but fascinating details of the daily lives of serfs, monks and Jews in the Middle Ages....Kalechofsky's descriptive and expository prose preserves a faint medieval flavor that never gets in the way of the meaning...."

Gerald Jonas

"Kalechofsky's impressivly broad understanding of medieval life and its complex protocols as well as her command of factual detail endow the novel with an intrinsic interest to those whose imagination and curiosity are piqued by the manifold issues raised by epic phenomena like the plague."

Studies in American Jewish Literature.

BODMIN, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years $15.00