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Title: Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen
Details: Copyright 2021, Penguin Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.
Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.
So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.
Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Last year was a big year for Witch books, both of real Witches and fictional/fantasy witches (and stories about witches that fall into either of those categories or teeter between the two), and I'll tell you right now if you haven't noticed already, this year will go even harder, if I have my way! So Witch books it is!
How I Liked It: It's one of the most used tropes in storytelling, but the thing is, it's something that actually happened, and for centuries. "Witch-hunt" is a term rife with social and political connotations and witch-hunts are a perennial favorite subject as a stand-in for something else. But what about the actual historical events? How do we reconcile looking back at the history that made the term when the term itself is still so much in use?
First, meet Katharina Kepler, unassuming and helpful (or so she thinks) community member, and assumed widow (her husband ran off to war when her children were young and never returned) with three surviving grown children, including the famed astronomer Johannes, her daughter Greta who is married to a pastor, and her particularly ornery son Christoph (of her four children to reach adulthood, three sons and a daughter, one of her sons died of illness but not before going mad). Katharina also has a neighbor, the somewhat shy and standoffish Simon, who is her legal guardian because it's the seventeenth century in Europe. The Witch Craze is hitting and unfortunately a healer and herbalist like Katharina is too rich a target.
Small minds and gossip rise to persecute Katharina and she turns to her family (including her aforementioned famous astronomer son) and her neighbor for help. The story is told by Katharina, by her neighbor Simon, and by court testimony of various townspeople for and against Katharina, and those neutral.
I have to say, if you're expecting a straightforward work about historical fiction, told in a straightforward historical fiction way (which is to say our modern language with a few airs and several phrases to set the setting) about a tragic subject, you're going to be disappointed. If you're weren't aware, this is a fictionalized account of a real woman, Katharina Kepler, and her real life and persecution for Witchcraft. It's RPF, technically.
But this is told in a purposely modern way, and there's plenty of dry humor to be had. Both the small-mindedness and sometimes downright silliness of the townsfolk, the silliness of some of Katharina's interactions with her neighbors, and even the silliness and human failing of the whole process comes through frequently.
"If we behave with grace, then they will behave with grace," Greta said. "I really believe that. If we show kindness and forgiveness, so will they."
"That's a deranged idea," Christoph said. "But I certainly would buy a round of cakes and beer for our enemies, if I thought it would help. That's what I was arguing toward before you came."
I asked, "Doesn't anyone want to know what the witch thinks?" None of them laughed or even gave me a half smile. Greta said she hoped I didn't make comments like that with others, that wasn't something I did, was it? I said no, it wasn't. (pg 26)
"When will the case be heard?" Christoph asked the clerk in closing.
"I'm new here," Sebald said through his scarf.
"Jew here?" Christoph said.
"New here," I said.
"I don't care if he's pumpkin stew or the blood of Christ," Christoph said. "I want to know when the case will be heard."
(pg 36)
So this is a very serious, very relevant subject about a real woman's life and it's being played for laughs like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm?
Nope, not exactly. The book's purposely modern tone seems not to spoon-feed history to modernity, but to point out ways of thinking that are unfortunately evergreen. While we may not torture and execute people for Witchcraft anymore (although please don't give conservatives/the current GOP any more terrible regressive ideas; they already are hungering to bring the Satanic Panic back), plenty of small-minded thinking, bigotry, and suspicion and fear still abound. It's not so much a moral righteousness as it is laziness and advancing oneself through cruelty and inhuman treatment of the marginalized. Just ask either of the waste of sentience governors, for two big examples, aiming to advance their national profiles by abusing trans children and Queer people.
Simon notes particularly:
I try my best to like people, to expect good from them. If you see someone as a monster, it is as good as attaching a real horn to them and poking them with a hot metal poker. I really do think so. (pg 55)
And Katharina struggles with his philosophy, even as people turn against her.
It's out of her desperation we get the title of the book. When treated uneasily by the town butcher, she reacts.
"It feels like a north wind, but it's coming from the east. Very strange." He was looking at me like I was specter-- or was he?
I should try to think well of him, I thought. I had Greta's voice in my head, telling me that all people are the image of God. Why not all voles, then? All fleas? They were God's creations, too. "I suspect it will be calm tomorrow."
He shook his head. "I see storms coming."
"Storms?"
"I'd say so. Purple skies behind you. You must know that."
That made me feel the butcher knife at my throat. "You think I'm the cause of storms?"
"I didn't say that, Katharina."
"Everyone knows your mother is a witch--"
"It was my aunt," he said.
His little boy was staring at me. I felt gray and rotten.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what I was talking about."
"Please don't hurt us," he said. (pg 73)
She then apologizes again and stumbles into the schoolmaster who she's known since he was a child, who also snubs her, and then girls selling candles part around her, leaving her to feel like "I were some furry clawed thing walking among quail."
Similarly, when reading testimony to the court, the same rude schoolmaster is revealed to be a former classmate of the famous astronomer, clearly jealous of his success, who sneers
"Everybody knows that Hans's mother is a witch, and everyone has known for a long time, and if only we had taken that more seriously, I suppose we thought it was games and tales. I thought it was schoolboy talk. I thought people were telling stories when they were telling the truth. Now I tell the truth and get accused of telling stories." (pgs 167 and 168)
Incidentally, his ramblings don't not sound like a certain reality TV host turned somehow-President.
Also, the misogyny and ageism inherent in Katharina's conviction leads to a slight fourth-wall-breaking. Simon later tries to sell Katharina's story as a book, but struggles to find a buyer. A more successful author cleaning up hears Simon struggling and offers a bit of advice:
In a quiet moment, the Englishman said to me, "If you don't mind a bit of advice: People don't like an old lady story, you know? I wouldn't lead with that part." What would he lead with? He said he wasn't sure, he would give it a think. He went on: "Even Shakespeare, very popular on all topics as he is, sticks to daughters and wives. An occasional mother. But not front and center, you know? You don't want an old lady front and center. Honestly never heard of such a thing."
Who was Shakespeare? I knew asking would only extend the conversation, so I didn't ask.(pg 260)
The book's not without its faults though. The emotional impact for which the author is aiming doesn't quite land because of the mishmash of styles of storytelling. We don't need it hammered home that what's happening is horrible, but the uneven tone blunts a great deal of the devastation. While the author's more or less nonchalant approach to the fact this atrocity is done through rumors, gossip, and suspicion is effective in communicating the pervasive awfulness, it doesn't work with the out-and-out tragedies of the book.
Still, the book offers a very human window into a much-discussed atrocity in a way that's accessible and realistic. While witch-hunts are a perennial favorite in storytelling, humanity still seems to struggle over and over with learning what the witch-hunts can still teach.
Notable: I usually discuss in Witch books such as these whether or not the witchcraft and witches depicted are real or not. As this book is historical fiction of the real life Witch hunts, the only Witches (or witches) that exist are the demonic creatures in the imaginations of the prosecutors and accusers. Katharina is a Christian and while the term "pagan" is used, it's meant in its most primitive usage, that which is not (in this case) explicitly Christian (so therefore interchangeable with "secular".
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While many elements of this book are real (the main character, the circumstances of her life, several other characters), the character of Simon the neighbor is fictionalized. As the author explains in the the acknowledgements:
I am most indebted to the marvelous German historian Ulinka Rublack for her celebrated nonfiction book The Astronomer and the Witch: Joannes Kepler's Fight For His Mother. I initially read Rublack's book simply to learn more about Johannes Kepler. A detail in Rublack's book-- a neighbor of Kathararina's asking to be dismissed from serving henceforth as her legal guardian-- caught my heart and opened up this novel for me. I have not used that neighbor's real name, Veit Schumacher, because his voice and life in this novel are wholly imagined. (pg 273)
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I have never enjoyed working on a book as much as I enjoyed working on this one, even as it is a sad book, written during a distressing time. (pg 274)
The fact the book is written about a time of (among other things) plague, written and published during a distressing time of (among other things) plague and the events described versus the time in which they are written and published into a book is four hundred years is quite a hit when one thinks about it.
Final Grade: B
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