John J. Clayton
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due July, 2007, Permanent Press
Kuperman’s Fire is partly a novel about criminal evil--the selling of chemical munitions abroad--from a Jewish perspective. It’s 1994. The protagonist, Michael Kuperman, is a very successful software CEO. His chief software designer, overseeing installation of a program for a large chemical corporation, discovers that some group within the corporation is selling chemicals abroad which, when combined, become chemical munitions. The story on which the novel hangs concerns Michael’s uncovering of the scheme. The novel moves toward the exposure of evil. As pressure grows, the Kuperman family has to run, hide their identity to save themselves.

The novel also deals with Kuperman’s complex heritage as a Jew. He’d like to simplify this heritage, to hide in a sentimental version of one part of his heritage, but in the course of the novel he becomes aware of its many strands--the passion for justice of his secular father as well as the religious faith of his mother, for whom he is in mourning. The multiple ways of being Jews in contemporary America play themselves out in the tensions within Michael’s family, a family at the edge of divorce. As the strands of the novel come together, so does the family.

It’s a novel of heritage. “All of us are here by a miracle. A grandfather who paid off a border guard, a gift of bread to a great grandmother, a neighbor who nursed a great-great grandfather through a fever. We are here because maybe a hundred years ago someone hid or someone fled or made a decision and his unborn children’s children weren’t buried in a killing pit, weren’t forced into a shower of Zyklon B. Each of us, a precious distillate.” The narrator is not speaking only of Jews--indeed, one of the recurrent motifs is the slaughter in Rwanda--but it is Jewish history that is examined. Into the 1994 present, the novel folds moments from the Jewish past that have made survival possible--Michael’s ancestors fleeing the Rhine valley eastward into Poland in the fourteenth century; fleeing Poland into Bessarabia in the seventeenth century. And in a direct, literal way the legacy of his grandfather protects him and his family. Michael is saved by draw¬ing on his heritage.

Kuperman’s Fire explores evil--not only monstrous narcissism, indifferent to life, but also delight in destruction--a delight that can’t be rationally explained. How are we to hold such evil in our minds? How can we cope with it emotionally, spiritually? The novel celebrates the miracle of our survival while it insists on our responsi¬bility to face evil and continue the miracle.