The Convert
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- €6.99
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant reconstruction of an incredible journey across medieval Europe to Egypt, and an untold story of forbidden love.
'Enthralling... A spectacular tale told with spectacular accomplishment' Sunday Times, Books of the Year
In the small village in Provence where Stefan Hertmans has made his home, people have long spoken of an ancient pogrom and hidden treasure. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, an extraordinary collection of Jewish documents was found in a synagogue in Cairo.
Hertmans has based The Convert on these historical sources, tracing the life of a young Christian noblewoman who abandoned everything for the love of a rabbi's son. In this startlingly contemporary novel, Hertmans follows in her footsteps as the lovers flee through France together, pursued by crusading knights, and recounts her dazzling journey full of love and hardship, courage and hate, as she travels on towards Jerusalem alone.
Jewish National Book Awards 2020 Finalist
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.
