Landsman
While we're figuring out what the online presence of our mothership Counterpoint will look like, I'm going to avail of this blog to alert folks to certain activities in Counterpointville—Exhibit A being an excellent interview on the Amazon books blog with Peter Charles Melman.
Frankly, I had no real desire to write a Civil War novel. For me, the spiritually redemptive arc of its protagonist was always far more intriguing. On a global level, I'll admit that one of the novel's aims was to explore the involvement of Jewish soldiery for the South during the Civil War, true. The moral ironies of why one minority--a minority into which I myself was born--might fight to maintain the enslavement of another, proved too altogether human a subject for me to ignore. Ultimately, though, I hope Landsman serves to take the Southern, Civil War-era Jew beyond the province of villain, victim, or saint, and to place him squarely where he belongs: into the realm of flaw and decency of which we're all understandably a part. I say this because to deny the grosser elements of Jewish-American history is to deny the very most human elements of Jewish-American history. That many of my characters--Jew and Gentile alike--are depraved, that they swear and sin, is testament to the frailties and moral subjectivities of every single one of us. And while it's while certainly a worn trope in fiction writing, that we're subsequently capable of redemption at all I quickly discovered to be the book's true focus.