I Am the Clay

Illuminating the horrors of war on a personal level--the hunger, the terror and the fatigue--this heart-wrenching novel will move readers to tears. more than once. Potok, brilliant chronicler of Hasidic life in such memorable novels as The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, maps new terrain here, `as' used below following the agonizing trek of an old Korean peasant couple as they leave their village in flight from the Chinese and ``the fiends from the North'' during the Korean conflict. In a drainage ditch on the side of the road, they find a seriously wounded boy. Although the old man tells his wife, ``I have no wish for this child,'' Do you hear me, wom an?,'' she will not abandon the youngster. Slowly, as they nurse him back to health`nurse him back to health' suggests this , he is able to return the favor: protecting them from a pack of wild dogs, finding fish to eat, acquiring an ox. A deep believer in spirits and the good or bad fortune they bequeath according to whim, the old man gradually comes to accept this boy who has been so lucky for them. On their way to becoming a family, each of the trio grapples with personal demons and dreams of a past that cannot be reclaimed--the old man fighting to suppress his insatiable craving for meat caught in his strong, young hunting days, the old woman recalling her baby son who died in infancy and the boy struggling to accept that his entire family has been killed, his childhood village eradicated. In prose as spare and uncluttered as the simple lives it evokes, this deeply felt book leaves no doubt that even in the blighted landscape of war there is always room for luck, and love. (May)