From Dust A Flame

Don’t store food beneath a bed. Never drink anything that has been left out overnight. Openings in a home cannot be permanently sealed. You can’t save an onion if you’ve removed the stem. These are rules I’ve always kept despite my skepticism about their origins. Because these rules are what protect me from sheidim (Demons of Jewish lore).

However, there is also another set of rules. A set that I inherently obeyed, no matter how much they made me squirm, chaffing against me like the plastic tag in a new piece of clothing I’ve forgotten to remove. A set of rules whose origins we didn’t dare to speak out loud but were plainly written in the numbers on my grandfathers arm. 

Don’t throw out food. No walking home alone at night from organic chemistry (yes, my parents arranged a carpool for me in COLLEGE). Keep the windows shut and the doors locked tight the night before Christmas and Easter. Forget Halloween. Jewish school let out early so we could all be safely shuttered away in our homes before dusk on those “eves” aka the nights a pogrom was most likely to happen back in the shtetl. The world outside had shown it was not a safe place, and I was therefore not allowed to participate in it. 

Somehow, some magical way, Rebecca Podos has written a book that articulates all of these rules, and so many more, through the lens of the American Jewish teenager of today. There is no one Jewish experience, in fact the Judaism in “From Dust A Flame” is distinctly different from the one I grew up practicing, but the underlying ethos is the same. This is a book about parents and children, the secrets we keep from each other and the generational trauma that keeps us from moving forward. That, in my humble opinion, is universal. 

The main character, Hannah, has been dragged around the country by a mother she has never quite understood and whom she suspects has always favored her adopted brother, Gabe. Yet on Hannah’s seventeenth birthday it is she, and not Gabe, who receives the family heirloom hamsa necklace from her mother and wakes up in the throes of a body transforming curse. Although her mother heads off to find help, it shortly becomes clear that she won’t be returning any time soon and Hannah and Gabe must search for a cure on their own. 

What they find is an entire Jewish family they knew nothing about, a partner in crime named Ari, and a Golem which they manage to reanimate. Along the way, Gabe grapples with his adoption and how it relates to the families newly found Judaism and Hannah begins to have some not- so – straight feelings towards Ari. 

This trio of teens is captivating, voicey and so full of love you can’t help but root for them, yet I hope you’ll allow me to show my age a bit when I tell you that the speech in the book that most resonated with me belonged to one of the moms. It’s hard to know where to draw the line between safety and paranoia when, as Ari’s mom put it in the book, everything from sheidim to uncut grapes is a danger. 

It’s a fine line that Podos expertly walks across three generations of Jews. When to hold fast and when to let go. How to regain what is lost after a mistake has been made. How to move forward together. Because at the end of the day, that is what Jews have been doing for generations. Gathering up what remains in the dust after the world comes for us and lighting that spark, the pintele yid, and nourishing it until once again it becomes a roaring flame. 

Note: I received an arc of this book from the author after saying I was coveting it so hard it was possibly a tenth commandment violation. I suppose she took pity on my immortal soul.

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E. Broderick is a writer and speculative fiction enthusiast. When not writing she enjoys epic games of trivial pursuit and baking. She currently lives in the U.S. but is eagerly awaiting the day a sentient spaceship offers to take her traveling around the galaxy.