Book Review: ‘A Wolf in the Soul’

Ira T. Berkowitz, A Wolf in the Soul, Leviathan Press, ISBN: 978-1-881927-13-6, 461 pages, $19.99

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – My father, who would have been 104 years old today, July 4, loved to play this trick with Tank, our pet dog who was half Boxer, half German Shepherd. Dad would get a piece of meat, and then whistle for Tank, who would immediately come bounding toward him. Picking up the scent of the meat Tank would start salivating and he would race toward dad, intent on his prize. Then suddenly, Tank would come to an abrupt halt, having heard two dread words from my father. “Not kosher!”

Sitting on his haunches, Tank would look at my father and then at the meat, hoping that dad would lift the severe decree, and pronounce the tender meat fit for consumption after all. “Okay,” dad would say eventually, “it’s ham!” Satisfied, Tank would pounce on it, never stopping to consider that ham isn’t kosher. After all, as dad would explain to his audience, a dog knows gornisht about kashrut.

I could not help reflecting on this story as I read what clearly is a brilliant novel by Ira Berkowitz. In one scene, Greg, the protagonist, is fretting that although the meatballs in his spaghetti were fashioned from kosher meat, his mother may have failed to keep her milchig utensils separate from the fleishig ones. What if the knife he was using came from the wrong drawer?

In another scene, Greg is ravenously hungry, so hungry that he greedily tears pieces of a defrosting chicken—still raw—and shoves them into his mouth, wolfing the food down as his younger sister watches in horror.

Not kosher. It’s only treif.

As a yeshiva student, Greg was brilliant but awkward. Classmates teased him about the way he moved, almost but not quite cat-like. Girls seemingly were repulsed by him, and his home life offered little in the way of pleasure. His mother and father were on the verge of divorce, and he was powerless to comfort his little sister, Jen.

Later, as a student at Columbia University, Greg perceived that canines were stalking him. Wherever he would go, there appeared dogs, or sometimes, when he walked in the nature preserve near his suburban home, there were wolves. He was bitten, or at least he thought he was,and later he began to hallucinate—or was it reality?—that he was becoming a wolf. He imagined stalking geese and deer, and he thrilled at the chase, lusted after the taste of their flesh. Could this be schizophrenia that sometimes overtakes people who seem perfectly normal during their youth, but begin to manifest mental illness in their college years?

When he was in such states, Greg could be quite dangerous. Woe to anyone who raised a hand against him. After one incident, he fled to Israel lest police were seeking him for assault. There, he was approached by a rabbi, who invited him to come study at his tiny yeshiva at which there were three other students. The rabbi, Hacham Dawid, seemed to understand what ailed Greg, whom he called by his Hebrew name, Gavi. But the rabbi could not cure the ailment, Greg/ Gavi needed to reach deep within himself and high above himself.

As author Berkowitz elucidates upon the riddle of what is happening to Greg, readers are treated to a journey through Jewish sources, including kabbalistic ones. We also are taken inside Greg’s head, as the rational human being within him argues, often powerlessly, with his wolf-like urges. We feel his excitement as he stalks prey, his fear as he himself becomes the hunted. And we appreciate his cries of anguish as he asks the Hacham and Hashem, “Why is this happening to me?”

In A Wolf in the Soul, Berkowitz has written both a psychological drama and a spiritual one, a tale that will keep readers entranced, in suspense, and along the way educated.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com