'At the Hour Between Dog & Wolf' by Tara Ison
An adolescent Jewish girl in hiding during the Holocaust? It’s a story that’s been told in memoir and fiction, but Tara Ison brings a different depth to the telling in At the Hour Between Dog & Wolf. The title comes from a French phrase describing twilight, “entre chien et loup,” alluding to primal things—the transformation that can occur as light fades into darkness.
And that is the perilous landscape where Ison places her protagonist, Danielle. In the early days of the Nazi occupation of France, the child of an affluent Jewish family in Paris is sent to a remote farm village under Vichy control with a false Gentile identity, The farm family’s mother and father, who once served Danielle’s family, accept the child out of gratitude and money. Their teenage son is militantly antisemitic, a fascist in training, and is less tolerant. The villagers embody the spectrum of expected attitudes in rural, conservative France. At the left, the Roman Catholic priest preaches the gospel of love to an audience of resentful, fearful country folk willing to embrace conspiracy theories to explain the course of events. Some villagers, drawing distinctions between French Jewish citizens and Jewish refugees in France, are willing to overlook the former and deport the latter. Although disliking the Germans, many accept them as allies against a greater enemy, Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Ison’s evocative prose transports readers into the novel’s setting. The hands of the kind mother of Danielle’s foster family are “callused from struggling to wield the big pitchfork, roughened from handling raw wool and splintered wood, from scrubbings in icy water and harsh homemade soap that smelled of rancid fat.” The near subsistence poverty of farm life has worsened with wartime rationing.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The arc of the novel concerns Danielle’s gradual conversion from bitter, secretive detachment from her unfamiliar new environment in a town largely hostile to Jews. She goes to mass on Sundays and prepares for confirmation, nursing large mental reservations and holds her tongue against the casual antisemitic disdain heard all around her. But little by little, she acclimates, and begins to turn …
With its many suspenseful scenes, At the Hour Between Wolf & Dog could be the basis for a great screenplay—but not a Hollywood screenplay. The big studios would try to dumb it down and lose the psychological complexity of Ison’s astonishing literary narrative.
