Yishay Ishi Ron’s latest novel, The Girl Who Rode the White Lion, is a propulsive, heartbreaking read. This is a book of modest length, but one that is full of big ideas. It is a story, rooted in some measure of historic truth, that compels you to suspend your sense of the possible in order to follow its story of torment, grief, compassion, and love. All of which is overlain with the evil of Nazism, the force furiously pushing events forward.
The novel moves from 1938 Germany, with the opening salvos of Kristallnacht, to New York City in the late 1950s, and from the early days of World War II to post-war France and Israel. Along the way, we are introduced to characters whose motivations are not always clear to us, given some of the decisions they make. There is one character, however, whose motivations are quite clear: an insecure, meager man who uses his newfound power as an SS officer to target a Jewish family whose greatest crime— in his damaged psyche — was to welcome him into their home on numerous occasions, and treat him as a friend.
Beyond that SS officer’s vengeful, genocidal ambitions lies a mystery: how did his Nazi ring wind up in the stomach of a deceased lion, the subject of an autopsy at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan years after the Nazis were vanquished? The veterinarian who discovers the ring — and brings it to an historian friend for identification — finds himself unable to shake his desire to identify the ring’s owner, and to unlock the story and solve the mystery of how the ring came to be inside the lion.
Unexpected twists and turns keep the reader wondering not only who will survive the chaos of World War II, but how the cruel cat and mouse game of Jews seeking to escape the Nazi maw will play out. In this larger ecosystem of cruelty, however, Ron’s narrative zooms in on the fate of a single child, given shelter along the way in a remarkable act of compassion by a performer in a visiting circus.
Each act of courage or kindness in the story seems to be exceeded by an act of cruelty meted out by the unconstrained SS officer. As we toggle between locations and decades, we are reminded of how life is not always about deliberate, well-planned decisions. In fact, the most consequential of decisions can—and sometimes must—be made in an instant. Whether that decision is to destroy or to save, to love or to lose, or to somehow accept and move on, each decision presents the reader with powerful examples to consider and to struggle with, just as the characters brought to life by Ron are compelled to do.
Without revealing the full unfolding of the mystery, suffice it to say that this is a story that grabs you and doesn’t let go. This is the result of how the story reveals itself cinematically in images and actions that have a truly larger-than-life quality. All of which leave a lasting imprint on the reader long after the last page has been turned.
Nina Mogilnik left a long career in philanthropy, non-profit, and government work to focus on family, on causes dear to her, and on her own writing, which she publishes on Medium, at the Blogs of the Times of Israel, and elsewhere.
