The Wolf Hunt by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

First published in Israel in 2021; published by Little, Brown and Company on August 15, 2023

Adam Schuster is a reserved, friendless boy who has been bullied at school. Although his mother is unaware of the extent of the bullying, her fear for Adam has been heightened by antisemitic graffiti and a recent shooting in a synagogue. She wants Adam to take a class in Krav Maga. While she thinks it would be beneficial for Adam to learn self-defense, she regards the lessons as less important than the benefit of socializing with other kids.

Adam’s mother is Leela, a version of her real name (Lilach) that is easier for Americans to pronounce. Adam’s father is Mikhael, although he goes by Michael. Leela and Michael were born in Israel but Michael’s employer, a military-industrial weapons designer, transferred him to the United States. Adam’s self-defense instructor is Uri. Like Michael, Uri served in the Israel Defense Force. Adam has heard rumors that Uri worked for Mossad.

Leela was defeated by the chase for academic credentials in Israel and welcomed the chance to be an unemployed housewife in America. Leela easily became the kind of woman she once detested, although she found a job organizing cultural activities at a retirement home so she could feel good about having a Latina cleaner instead of doing her own housework.

Leela and Michael grew used to the idea of raising Adam as an American. Leela thought it would be best for Adam because she loved Israel “the way a woman loves her abusive husband.” By the age of six, Adam didn’t want to speak Hebrew outside the home — he wanted to fit in — but his attitude changed at sixteen, when he started to study Krav Maga under Uri’s tutelage. His attitude about his primary tormenter, Jamal Jones, also changed. He talked to another kid about killing Jamal and had “disturbing searches” on his phone.

Adam attended a party with nearly everyone from his class. Jamal died at the party, apparently from a drug overdose. As the novel begins, the police suspect that Adam murdered him. Leela is certain that her son is a good boy, even as the evidence begins to suggest that he might be an antisocial nutcase. Whether Adam murdered Jamal is the question that supplies the novel’s dramatic tension.

When the police search Adam’s home, some members of the community regard him as a murderer. He deals with antisemitic graffiti at his school and vandalism of his home. Uri tries to help with security, but Leela is conflicted by her fear that Uri is a negative influence on Adam and her feelings of lust.

The story is told from Leela’s point of view. She has an understandable aversion to believing anything bad about her son, but she has apparently spent her life hiding from reality. In Israel, when she inadvertently clicked on a news channel that showed a Palestinian woman with a dead baby in her arms, Leela promptly turned on an episode of Friends, where Phoebe “appeared like a blond good fairy to take me away from there.”

As the novel progresses, Leela connects with Jamal’s mother (before Adam becomes a known suspect), learns a secret that Jamal concealed from his family, and wonders about Adam’s secrets. Because of her own unacknowledged prejudice, she blames the Nation of Islam for vandalizing her house. She likens a rock thrown through her window to an intifada. Because Jamal was Black, she begins to fear that every Black man she sees will seek revenge.

I suspect that the reader is not meant to like Leela. She has a sense of entitlement that combines with irrational anger to make her disagreeable. She thinks the worst of her husband and responds in kind. She once suffered a few days of paranoid delusion. Her therapist suggested that she feels like an outsider everywhere, not just in America. Perhaps Leela is suffering from a mental health condition. If so, she can’t be blamed for being unwell. While some readers might have sympathy for Leela, her emotional issues do not make her any more likable. I don’t believe interesting characters necessarily need to be likable, but many readers disagree.

The novel addresses familiar themes of persecution and discrimination from the unusual perspective of a woman caught between two worlds who might be a little bit crazy. I appreciated a brief but interesting discussion of whether money should supplant ideology — whether performance ratings should be more important than race and religion — or whether money is the most dangerous ideology because “it holds nothing sacred and allows you to do anything.”

Much of the story seems to plod along as a domestic drama that treats the central question — is Adam a murderer? — as secondary to all the other issues that provoke Leela’s anxiety. Yet a potential answer to that question, when it finally comes, is truly surprising. At the moment of its arrival, it becomes clear that the novel is a clever mystery. Jamal’s death is only part of a larger story that is carefully hidden until the story’s climax.

The reveal does not entirely resolve the mystery. Some readers might dislike the uncertainty, but in a novel told from a mother’s point of view, uncertainty might be more horrifying than knowledge of the truth. Until I reached the final page, I wasn’t quite sure whether I would recommend The Wolf Hunt, but the prose is graceful and, in the end, I appreciated the story’s ability to tantalize with so many unanswered questions.

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