I feel the last few years have seen a flourishing in fantasy novels that explicitly centre the Jewish experience in European history. Or perhaps it’s just that I’m encountering them more in the scattershot sampling of fantasy that I read. Either way, Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros (The City Beautiful, Bone Weaver) is a book concerned with Jewishness and survival in the face of hostility. It’s also a book that speaks strikingly to queer themes.
Wrath Becomes Her sets itself in eastern Europe during WWII (near Vilnius, which was at different times immediately after WWI claimed by Poland, the Republic of Lithuania, and Soviet Russia before the German invasion). The Nazis are the current occupying force, and Jewish communities are caught between German genocide on one hand, local antisemitic pogroms on the other, and the background antisemitism of the Soviet partisans on a third. Wrath Becomes Her’s protagonist is Vera, who begins the book without a mouth but longing to speak: Vera is a golem, created by a Jewish father, Ezra, not out of holiness but through forbidden magic and the desecration of corpses. To Ezra, Vera is a tool to enact his vengeance on the Nazis who killed Chaya, his teenaged partisan daughter. To Vera, Ezra is a father-figure, an impression reinforced by the faint memories that swim up from the depths of her consciousness. She has some of Chaya’s memories—and, she soon learns, Ezra is incorporating pieces of Chaya into her creation: tongue, teeth, eyes, hair. Maybe even soul.
When the Nazis raid the farm and barn where Ezra has been in hiding, bringing Vera into being, Vera flees. Chance brings her to Akiva, the last survivor of Chaya’s partisan band, who at first mistakes her for Chaya. Her true nature is a surprise to him, but he quickly accepts her as a comrade in his quest to kill as many Nazis as possible before he dies. Vera, on the other hand, wants to find Ezra at least as much as she wants to carry out the vengeance with which he has charged her, though her willingness to just kill every Nazi (or random local shooting at her) who gets in her way is refreshingly straightforward.
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Wrath Becomes Her
While Vera is welcomed by most of the Jewish refugees hiding in the forest, at least one, a rabbi, tries to destroy her, insisting that she’s an abomination. But together with Akiva she makes her way to Vilnius (Vilna), where the Nazis have been collecting Jewish mystical texts. Ezra’s not there, and Vera can’t kill any Nazis in the city without bringing retribution down on the heads of innocents. But one of the partisan sympathisers who shelters them along the way has a radio, and learns that a new German secret weapon is being shipped in by train. Vera can prevent the weapon’s delivery and seize it for the Jewish partisans.
But when she and Akiva separate the train carriage that’s carrying the weapon from its engine and bring the boxes containing the weapon back to the safehouse, they discover that the boxes contain… clay. German clay.
The Nazis are making their own golems, using tools and theories stolen from the Jewish people they’re murdering en masse, because the ordinary technologies of war just aren’t enough for their destructive projects. Vera can infiltrate Trakkai Castle, where the boxes were bound, and put a stop to it. But that’s where they’re making Nazi golems, at least one of which is an inhuman monster even worse than the human ones, because he’s harder to stop.
I confess I find it difficult to discuss novels set against a backdrop of genocide, and even more so when the mass killing of civilians and the rhetoric of elimination dominates the news from all angles. It seems the Holocaust, largest of history’s many pogroms, is doomed to remain of terrible relevance. Polydoros isn’t shy about the kinds of violence that attended that project in Europe’s eastern borderlands, nor is he shy about the species of hope and resignation, despair and determination, that this violence provokes in its victims and its survivors.
Vera’s experience of her embodiment—her creation at Ezra’s hands, her desperation to speak, her desire to shape herself, her desire to be perceived as a person—strike me as open to very queer and trans readings. As does her concern that the circumstances of her creation, out of forbidden magic and parts of a dead girl, might somehow taint her, or make her very existence somehow an abomination to other people. (Every queer person over a certain age has experienced a frisson of that kind of fear.) I think I should leave trans writers to discuss the potential trans readings, however. I would be interested in reading such a discussion, but I lack the practical or theoretical grounding to participate in one.
Structurally and in terms of its narrative progression, Wrath Becomes Her reminds me very much of a video game. (This is not a criticism: The narrative achievements of the video game form are their own kind of art, and the form as a whole seems to have finally matured into a widespread willingness to experiment.) Wrath Becomes Her as a narrative has several discrete goal-oriented sequences: Vera’s initial escape from the Nazi raid, her discovery of Akiva and their fraught arrival at the forest camp, their journey together with a young woman to the safehouse outside Vilna, their infiltration of the Vilna ghetto, their exfiltration of Vilna, their train raid, Vera’s infiltration of Trakkai Castle, her showdown with the Nazi golem, and even, in the end, Akiva’s fate remind me enduringly of the kind of video game missions that are to me exemplified by the Sniper Elite franchise (albeit here with rather more sensitivity and less grotesque celebration of bullet-driven death). They’re narrative vignettes organised around a goal, during which the protagonist explores a different environment, where most of the characters encountered are instrumental to the goal or mission, rather than having a lasting effect on the protagonist. This gives Wrath Becomes Her, despite the horrors of its setting, more of the air of an action-adventure story than it would otherwise possess.
Wrath Becomes Her is a slick, fast-paced and effective wartime adventure. If I would’ve preferred something a little less slick, with a little less of the Nazis doing magic and a little more of the people building communities in the face of terrible circumstances, that’s on me, not on Polydoros. Vera is a compelling character, and on the whole, the novel takes an interesting approach to her revenge-quest.
Wrath Becomes Her is published by Inkyard Press.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. She was a finalist for the inaugural 2020 Ignyte Critic Award, and has also been a finalist for the BSFA nonfiction award. She lives in Ireland with an insomniac toddler, her wife, and their two very put-upon cats.
