August '44

Gébler’s engrossing novel deals, at one level, with the adolescence of Saul, a French Jewish boy living rough with his extended family to evade capture by the Nazis. But the striking feature of Gébler’s novel is that this framing narrative also incorporates a lengthy Jewish folktale which portrays another period of anti-Semitic persecution, this time in sixteenth-century Prague; this is brought to an end by the sagacity of the local rabbi, aided by the golem, the creature he has fashioned out of clay.

Through this interpolation Gébler meditates on the power of story – ‘this extraordinary invented world’ – and storytelling, suggesting poignantly the necessity of narrative to the human psyche. Following the tragic denouement of the story of Saul and his family, it is the folktale which eventually sustains the boy, allowing him to transcend and transform the loneliness and pain of reality.