Wayfarers by Arnon Z. Shorr; OxRock Productions, LLC; © 2024; ISBN 9798989-459421; 212 pages plus acknowledgments; $12.99.
SAN DIEGO – Seventy million people have been killed in a war from which a sinister figure known only as “the senator” has emerged with the mission of finally extinguishing all vestiges of organized religion.
In this novel, which was adopted from author Shorr’s unrealized screenplay, Abe Katz, a civil engineer, was imprisoned after he told New Dominion interrogators that yes, he was a Jew, even though he had stopped practicing Judaism following his bar mitzvah and had adopted the regime’s rigid secularism.
From the senator’s point of view, religion had propelled the last war: “They believed—they truly believed—that the Great Drought was the punishment of a divine being,” he ruminates. “This superstition, the harmless fantasy of little minds, became the driving force that thrust nation against nation, faith against faith. We must not forget that. We must not lose sight of the ashes from which we rose. We must never forget the conflagration.”
The senator had a draconian solution. Outlaw religion, destroy places of worship, and burn all their sacred texts so no memory of religion would remain. Eliminate all believers, whatever their faith, who nevertheless cling to religion.
Katz, too, might have been killed, except that a new cellmate, Jonathan, too beaten to go on living, explained to him how to escape from prison and join a small band of Jews led by Moshe. In an age of advanced technology, Moshe wore a pendant that in essence was a super thumb drive containing the texts of many thousand volumes of Jewish learning. That thumb drive, which could preserve and eventually regenerate Judaism, was called the Ark. The senator placed an extreme priority on locating Moshe and destroying him along with the Ark.
Katz is able to make his way to Moshe’s small band, whose leader lectures: “Every religion has its strength … Broadly speaking, Christians have faith, Muslims have pride, Buddhists have discipline. Every religion you can name has a quality that keeps it alive. Our strength is knowledge. We are called the people of the book. The book—all the books—are here with me, in the ark.”
The senator has an Army with airplanes and tanks while Moshe and Abe have only a few followers, their wits, and perhaps the Divine One, on their side, as they try to escape the New Dominion through the desert wilderness to an unnamed country. Parallels to the Exodus are intentional in this post-apocalyptic tale.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.