Review of Guardians of the Flame: A historical fiction about the wars of the Maccabim
Guardians of the Flame: A historical fiction about the wars of the Maccabim
By C. Cohen
Adir Press
2024
296 pages
Reviewed by Steve Lipman
In the Books of the Maccabees—an apocryphal part of ancient Scriptures that are not included in Judaism’s holy canon but provides a large portion of what has come to be recognized as the Chanukah story of spiritual rededication—there is no mention of a character named Gilad.
But there is in C. Cohen’s novel.
Gilad—a reluctant teenaged hero of the Maccabees’ successful battle against the Hellenistic Greek forces who had desecrated the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and cruelly tried to impose their pagan practices on the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land—is the protagonist of Cohen’s fiction work, which describes the events in the year preceding the Maccabees’ military victory in 164 BCE.
We see the “Maccabees vs. Greeks” encounter through Gilad’s eyes and actions.
Gilad is a foot soldier in the Maccabees’ army, a symbol of the Jews who merited the defeat of the powerful Greeks.
Cohen’s Gilad is an ordinary Jew who becomes an extraordinary guardian of Jewish pride.
Guardians of the Flame (the reference is to the flames produced by the vial of oil that symbolized the restored Beit Hamikdash) reads like a gripping adventure novel—although we know, millennia later, how the story ended.
“The five Chashmonai brothers” around whom the novel centers, “their father, and the Greek generals against whom they fought are all real,” Cohen writes in the book’s introduction. “This novel, though a work of fiction, is based directly off the known events and historical backdrop of the time period that surrounded the lives of these historical figures.” To write the book, Cohen thoroughly researched the geography and flora and fauna of Second Temple Israel.
The author combines faith and doubt, bravery and cowardice, friendship and betrayal, acceptance and suspicion, zealotry and reluctance, to make an episode come alive.
“The halachot of war” with which the novel’s key individuals deal “are intricate, delicate, and subject to fierce debate,” Cohen adds. “The author tried to maintain both sensitivity and balance regarding the halachot of pikuach nefesh [self-sacrifice] and the dire requirements of war. Still, the military decision-making of the characters in this book is merely contrived, and is not meant to weigh in on millennia-old halachik and hashkafic decisions regarding the complexities of war.”
In other words, Cohen’s creation, her first book (all 90,000 words of it), is an exercise in literary imagination, not a treatise of historical veracity; her dialogues sound realistic, her characters are fleshed out, with human vulnerabilities, and her scenarios paint a vivid picture of what the Maccabees and their followers undoubtedly went through.
The author combines faith and doubt, bravery and cowardice, friendship and betrayal, acceptance and suspicion, zealotry and reluctance, to make an episode come alive. Her scenes are reminiscent of the Shoah-era stories of underground, anti-Nazi resistance units.
In this period before Chanukah, which celebrates the lives of the Maccabees, Guardians of the Flame is a fitting preparation for the observance of the eight days that constitute, in actuality, a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar.
Cohen, a native of Chicago and current resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, who graduated from Stern College and has worked as a OU-JLIC Torah educator at Queens College, now works as senior educator for the OU’s Yavneh Young Professionals program. She was drawn to the Chanukah story because she is fascinated by the Second Temple period. In an interview with Jewish Action, Cohen said she chose this (literally) novel approach to her work of historical fiction—basing her writing on the Books of the Maccabees, the history recorded by Josephus, and the writings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch—because she didn’t feel authorized to invent dialogue and feelings of Judah Maccabee, an actual person.
But she could do it for someone like Gilad, whom she invented in the first place.
Gilad, a Jewish “superhero,” who could appeal to the current generation of young Jewish readers.
Jews today need heroes, Cohen said. Especially young Jewish boys. Especially young Jewish boys who face their own struggles. As her Gilad did.
Cohen said much literature in the Orthodox community tends to offer more examples of heroic Jewish women, relatable Jewish women who dealt with and conquered personal struggles, than of Jewish men. The type of popular “gedolim books” that present the lives of noted rabbis and scholars typically describe them as men “without a yetzer hara,” dealing with no internal challenges to overcome, she said—those are not realistic role models for young Jewish men.
Hence, Gilad. A person who grows spiritually in his year with the Maccabees, who is arguably typical of his fellow soldiers, who is a composite of the legions of “faceless, nameless” men who joined the Maccabees.
Through the eyes of Gilad—an orphan, “a youth of the forest” searching for his family—the reader learns about the exploits of the venerated Maccabees, especially of Judah Maccabee (“The Maccabee”), whom Cohen depicts as an inspirational, uncompromising leader driven by religious belief.
Her profile of Judah Maccabee is a reflection of her advanced studies of leadership traits.
At the end of the book, Cohen provides a helpful Historical Appendix as well as “Other Notes and Points of Interest,” including a guide to “Popular Second Temple Names.”
How would Cohen consider Guardians of the Flame a success among its readers?
If it inspires them, especially young readers, to have confidence that they can deal with their own challenges, Cohen said. And if it teaches them a sense of pride in Jewish history, in individuals like Gilad. “I want them to be proud of the Jewish people.”
Steve Lipman is a frequent contributor to Jewish Action.