The Convert
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Set at the time of the Crusades and based on historical events, The Convert is the story of a strong-willed young woman who sacrifices everything in the name of love.
When Stefan Hertmans learns that Monieux, the small Provençal village in which he lives, was the scene of a pogrom a thousand years ago and that a treasure may be hidden there, he goes in search of clues. The first is a letter, written in Hebrew nearly a thousand years ago, originally discovered among a startling collection of Jewish documents in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late nineteenth century.
This letter sets Hertmans off on the trail of a young woman who fled her powerful Christian family to marry the love of her life, the son of the chief rabbi of France, for whom she renounced her own faith. Originally known as Vigdis, the young woman changed her name to Hamoutal upon converting to Judaism. Her father offered a large sum to anyone who could bring her back, but the lovers managed to escape to Monieux. They were not safe for long, though: Monieux bore witness to a bloody pogrom, after which Hamoutal found herself alone and once again having to flee.
Hertmans retraces Hamoutal's footsteps—first through the French cities of Rouen, Narbonne and Marseille, as she makes her way south, fleeing her family, and then on to Sicily and ultimately to Cairo, where she sought asylum. It is a dizzying, often terrifying journey, full of hardships, that unfolds against the backdrop of the death and destruction of the Crusades.
The Convert is both an epic love story and a harrowing portrait of the havoc wrought by holy war. It is a tale of flight, and fear, a story that seeks to answer a pivotal question: What does it mean to change your identity?
Born in 1951, Stefan Hertmans has published novels, short-story collections, essays and poetry. In 1995 he was awarded the three-yearly Flemish poetry prize. He has also received two nominations for the VSB Poetry Prize. His most recent novel, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This commanding historical novel from Flemish author Hertmans (War and Turpentine) follows a Jewish convert during an unstable moment in Medieval Europe. Vigdis Adelais, a 17-year-old Christian woman from a prominent Norman family in Rouen, France, falls in love with David Todros, a Jewish student at a local yeshiva, in 1088. Risking grave penalty and dodging knights sent by her family to find her, Vigdis flees with David to his family's home in Southern France. After converting, she struggles to learn Jewish customs. Her husband, who calls her Hamoutal, masks her Christian origins by telling a rabbi that her real name is Sarah. After a new pope preaches the first crusade in 1096, knights perpetuate a gruesome pogrom in their small mountain town, killing David and abducting two of their children. Hamoutal, broken by grief, embarks on a perilous quest to find her children that has tragic consequences. The vivid descriptions of the era and Hamoutal's deteriorating mental state mostly excuse Hertmans's distracting breaks in the fictional narrative with chapters of his own travelogue ("I drive out of Brussels in the afternoon"). The novel will satisfy readers willing to be swept away into a starkly different time.
Customer Reviews
It won me over
Author
Flemish Belgian. Prolific writer of fiction, poems, essays, you name it, who has taught at universities in Europe, the UK, and North America. His best known work, at least in the Anglophone world, is the novel War and Turpentine (2013, English translation 2016) which is based on his grandfather's notebooks about the time before, during and after the First World War. It was one of the New York Times 10 best books of 2016, and was long listed for the Man Booker International.
Plot
Vigdis is the daughter of a Norman nobleman and his Catholic wife, who live in medieval Rouen. Normans were originally Norsemen, as in descendants of Vikings. Hence, her funny name. She’s born in 1070, four years after William the Concretor did his thang at Hastings. The Normans are kind of a big deal. Our gal is brought up right, but still manages to fall for a cute Rabbi’s son from Narbonne who’s studying at a yeshiva nearby. The lovers abscond to Narbonne, where she turns into a blue eyed, blonde haired proselyte named Hamoutal. (The chick got dealt a bad hand all round when it came to names). She and David (what else) marry and she punches out a couple of kids. The thing you need to understand is that, by this stage, the tribes of Israel have been tolerated in Europe for several hundred years, but the crusaders are heading east, honing their skills for when they reach the Holy Land with the odd pogrom or three. Not only that, Vigdis/Hamoutal’s Dad is offering big bucks, or denarii, or whatever, for the return of his daughter. The young family hides out for six years in a mountain village. Soon after Hamoutal drops sprog number three, David gets dead in gruesome fashion, along with a heap of his mates, the older kids are taken, and Hamoutal and the infant are left for dead. She finds her way to Cairo where she lobs up on the steps of the synagogue nigh unto death, is nursed back to health, marries again, has another kid, finds out her oldest two are with her parents back in Rouen, and decides to get them back. Suffice to say things don’t end well for her, although in best Jewish tradition, it takes a long time. Comets feature: Halley’s in 1066 and another one in 1107.
Characters
As in War and Turpentine, the author, who lives in the small village where David and Hamoutal took refuge back in the day, is a major player, providing us with an updated travelogue of all the places he visited and things he did while chasing down the story behind a couple of fragments of letters in Hebrew he found in a library in Cambridge. Vigdis/Hamoutal and the rest are well described, but from a distance. I imagine that’s inevitable when you’re describing incompletely documented events that may or may not have taken place in the 11th century, not that I’m ever likely to find out.
Narrative
First person authorial alternating with third person from our gal’s POV.
Prose
Mr H is a fine writer, Mr McKay is a fine translator, or both because what sounds like a hot mess from my description above hangs together extremely well: clear and concise in the main , discursive when necessary, and frequently poetic.
Bottom line
Call me old fashioned (most people do) but I generally have little truck with authors who insert themselves into their own fiction as intrusively as Mr Hertsman does. I’m not sure why exactly, but it works here IMHO, even better than it did in War and Turpentine.