Wartime novel’s powerful themes resonate today

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This article was published 04/03/2023 (961 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the beginning of her new novel, author Tara Ison introduces readers to her protagonist, a naïve 12-year-old Parisian Jewish girl named Danielle Marton. As the novel proceeds, Ison writes less about Danielle and focuses instead on Marie-Jeanne Chantier, an antisemitic, fascist-sympathizing, church-going Catholic girl who lives in a small remote village in Southern France with her aunt and uncle, Berthe and Claude.

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, however, is not the story of two girls. It is the story of one — Danielle and Marie-Jeanne are the same person.

Ison, an accomplished fiction writer and fiction teacher at Arizona State University, handles this fraught, complicated scenario with ease and finesse. She deftly describes the desperate circumstances that lead to Danielle’s transformation into Marie-Jeanne, and what that transformation means for Danielle and the people in her life.

Danielle, readers learn, is taken to live with Berthe and Claude — who are not really her aunt and uncle — shortly following the murder of her father by the Nazis at the start of the 1941 German occupation of France. At first, as Danielle hides in plain sight, posing as Berthe and Claude’s recently orphaned niece, she is resentful of and confused by the role she is forced to play and the unfamiliar rules and rituals of a religion and culture to which she doesn’t belong. Gradually, convinced that her mother — who has gone underground — will never return to reclaim her, Danielle represses all memories of her former life and becomes the girl she is pretending to be.

Intent on fully embracing her new identity, Marie-Jeanne begins to reiterate the lies being told about the Jewish people, and soon falls under the spell of a charismatic member of Vichy France’s CGQJ, the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs. That association leads her to commit terrible acts of betrayal.

Ison makes Danielle’s initial fear and nervousness palpable, and is equally adept at depicting the girl’s trauma and subsequent disorientation and determination to fit in and forget.

“Danielle is just a word, a some unofficial her, a figment girl,” Danielle convinces herself, “…but Marie-Jeanne is me, is I, blessed by holy water and the Holy Ghost and the state, the real girl in the mirror now… Marie-Jeanne, named for saints.”

Danielle/Marie-Jeanne, it quickly becomes evident, is not the only member of her new household, quiet village or divided country affected by the turmoil and challenges of the time, nor is she the only one conflicted by impossible choices and compromises.

The fact that Danielle/Marie-Jeanne is just a child, however — struggling just to be, to exist — makes her trajectory all the more tragic. It is not until the beautifully rendered final chapter of this novel, however, that the terrible toll of that trajectory becomes painfully clear.

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a thoughtful, compelling and poignant novel about trauma, survival, identity, home, faith and family. It is a work of historical fiction, but it is historical fiction that is frighteningly relevant more than 80 years after the events it describes took place.

Hateful extremist ideology, after all, is hardly an imagined phenomenon — and hardly a thing of the past.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer.