October 7th by Allan Havis; Willow River Press, 2026
By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
Allan Havis, a UC San Diego playwright and director of its Jewish Studies Program, has written a novel that tracks the aftershocks of a single day across several lives. In a tunnel, a tribunal tells a man named Ahmed that he is not being punished; he is being contained. The distinction is delivered without drama, yet it organizes what follows. Ahmed is kept because the group is short of men and restricted because unsupervised contact with a hostage has already been classified as a risk. He is neither cleared nor condemned. He is catalogued.
The book moves among a captive Israeli soldier, an American surgeon and her family, an interrogator, a graduate student, and several public commentators. The strands remain largely parallel. What links them is not plot but the recurring discovery that earlier language—about resistance, about context, about moral equivalence—now requires either defense or silence. The novel records that discovery with consistent restraint. Whether the restraint clarifies or merely limits the inquiry is the question the rest of the book must answer.
The early chapters that follow the soldier are the most controlled. Havis limits the description to what the character can register under constraint—sound, temperature, the intervals between visits—and avoids both graphic elaboration and overt commentary. The restraint is effective as far as it goes. Once the narrative widens, however, the same spareness begins to read as thinness. Characters are introduced with a few identifying traits and a political or professional position, then largely left to enact that position. The surgeon’s medical precision is set against the messiness of family argument; the graduate student’s academic training is set against campus pressure. These contrasts are clear enough, but they rarely develop beyond the initial juxtaposition.
Havis is attentive to the ways earlier political commitments become inadequate once concrete violence has occurred. Several characters discover that language they once used without much cost now requires defense or revision. The novel records these moments of discomfort—awkward family calls, a lecturer choosing silence, a podcaster recalibrating tone—but does not press very hard on what the discomfort produces. Most of the figures either retreat into private activity or restate earlier positions with minor adjustments. The book treats this range of responses as evidence of the situation’s difficulty rather than as material for further examination.
The decision to withhold any strong authorial judgment is consistent, yet it leaves the novel with limited means of distinguishing among the positions it presents. An interrogator’s private reservations, a parent’s reluctance to confront a child’s slogans, and a commentator’s tactical ambiguity are all rendered with roughly the same detachment. Readers are left to supply the distinctions the narrative declines to draw. In some passages this produces a useful uncertainty; in others it simply flattens the stakes. Institutional and ideological patterns that shaped the pre-October 7 environment appear mainly as background weather rather than as forces that any of the figures must actively confront or evade.
Stylistically, the book favors short scenes and limited physical description. Dialogue carries most of the weight, and much of it consists of characters stating or defending positions they already hold. The chronological structure returns several times to the same hours from different locations, underscoring the simultaneity of distant reactions but also producing repetition once the main attitudes have been established. Ordinary activities—clinic rounds, grocery shopping, the preparation for a class—are placed beside the knowledge of ongoing violence, yet these juxtapositions remain largely illustrative. They do not accumulate into a more sustained inquiry into how ordinary life continues, or fails to continue, under the new conditions.
The novel ends without resolution or shared recognition among its characters. This is a defensible formal choice, but it also leaves several strands in roughly the same condition in which they began. The soldier’s situation is unresolved; the American family has adjusted its routines without altering its underlying disagreements; the public figures continue to manage their audiences. Havis seems more interested in documenting the persistence of these separate trajectories than in testing whether sustained contact with the others can alter any of them.
The result is a book that registers a range of responses without asking much of them. October 7th will be of interest to readers who want a multi-perspective account that avoids both partisan certainty and graphic intensity. It is less successful as an examination of how prior commitments constrain or enable moral response once the constraints of ordinary life have been removed. The novel’s restraint is genuine, yet it also functions as a limit. By refusing to push its characters beyond the positions they arrive with, Havis produces an aftermath that remains, for long stretches, curiously static.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.