I like the author‘s writing and have read two of their earlier dark fantasies. But I have deep misgivings about this book. People should write about whatever they want regardless of my opinion, obviously. Yet, what is the intended purpose of this book? Is it to entertain readers with a gruesome dark fantasy that happens to be set during the Shoah? Probably not, but many readers will likely take it as such. Is it to work through intergenerational trauma? Is it to counterbalance the horrible, vapid, and demeaning Holocaust stories already on the shelves? Perhaps. Does it achieve that goal? I doubt it.

The Jewish Book Council reviewer said: 

“Wrath Became Her is a nov­el that is sit­u­at­ed square­ly in the Jew­ish gaze, for Jew­ish read­ers. That’s not to say that non-Jew­ish read­ers won’t enjoy it; they will. But it is unapolo­get­i­cal­ly Jew­ish.”

Yes to unapologetically Jewish books. But should we not have a vocabulary other than “enjoyment” for talking about books set during the Shoah?

Whomever this book was written for, it wasn’t written for me.

Vera, the protagonist, is a golem created by a bereaved father using forbidden sorcery and parts of his murdered daughter’s body. She is newly made, yet she has some memories as well as knowledge of several languages and many Jewish texts inscribed into her clay body. Even though she is in the middle of the Nazi conquest of Lithuania, she learns about everything secondhand, and there is a sense of disconnection. She is not part of any community that is being destroyed, she is an outsider looking at their destruction, and deciding how she wants to help, if at all. Her participation in resistance is optional: “I didn’t know what I wanted anymore… he had made it sound so simple, creating my own purpose.” Everyone else is struggling to survive, and she’s having a golem identity crisis. For me, this rang hollow.

“My first and greatest crime was to be brought into this world. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became… I had never asked to be born, but I wasn’t willing to simply crumble back into clay. I didn’t know what I wanted or where my future waited for me. The only thing I could do was keep moving, and maybe someday this world would make sense to me.”

Golem teen angst against the backdrop of mass murder? Not my cup of tea.

There was a lot that didn’t work for me in this book, despite the author’s often poetic writing. The audiobook narrator’s American accent was grating. The recurring refrain “Next year in America” made me cringe. It was meant to be poignant, I think. Her kind-of boyfriend says: “You are a memorial. Our history, our faith, it’s written all over you. As long as you survive, so will we.” Hopeful words, but also hollow. There was no golem to preserve “our history, our faith,” or even a single life. At least 95% of Jews in Lithuania were murdered by Nazis and Lithuanians. Even a novel that tries to portray the Shoah more realistically, like this one, ends up sugarcoating the horrors. “Mir veln zey iberlebn” - but a fictional golem has nothing to do with it.

As for the wrath in the title, who is Vera really angry at? Everyone? Her hatred of her creator, the bereaved father, is unalloyed: “his pain and ignorance did not absolve him.” At the end, she rages against the Jews hiding in the forest when the rabbi doesn’t want to use forbidden sorcery. “No, the abomination is you humans, you petty cruel humans, you are the ones who caused this violence, you bring suffering and pain and then you create creatures like me in order to fix it. It is you humans!” Raging against dispossessed Jews on death’s door is… a choice. Putting the Nazis and their victims on the same plane, as “petty cruel humans… who caused this violence” is a choice.

So yeah, this book did not work for me.