A Story of the Jews, the Romans and “The Mistake”

Like the characters in her recent historical novel The Mistake: The Marcus Chronicles Book 1, author Mara Schiffren moves between cultures. Born in New York and raised in Northern California, she first visited Israel as a 10-year-old with her mother and sister. The visit made a powerful impression on her as she was already sensing the vulnerability of being a Jew in America after her first antisemitic experiences.

“I realized how vulnerable American Jews were to antisemitism when they grow up assimilated, experiencing only a tepid, cultural Judaism, while remaining ignorant about their religion and history. I came to understand that the best way of fighting back against antisemitism was to make your Judaism a strength,” recalls Schiffren, a resident of North Salem, New York.

Photo contributed by Mara Schiffren.

As a student at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico, she did a deep dive into Greek philosophy and history, along with esoteric studies. After graduating, she embarked on a long voyage of a return to Judaism as a “baal teshuvah” with travel and learning that would help inform her understanding of the life of Jews in the turbulent Roman Empire of the second century CE.

“I worked for a while after college, then went to France for nine months and studied French at the Sorbonne. Then I meandered through Italy and took the boat to Greece from Bari and then to Turkey.”

Crete followed, then a boat to Haifa and a bus to Jerusalem, where she stayed with baal teshuvah relatives. “I was very open to their ideas,” she recalls. She eventually studied at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Her reading ability in Hebrew advanced, followed by ulpan at Hebrew University. While there studying by coincidence she spotted a journal article that riveted her attention, “Form(s) of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ,” by Gedaliahu Stroumsa, a professor at Hebrew University. Part of the article deals with the story of Metatron—the highest angel in Judaism. A famous Talmudic story involves rabbis having mystical experiences that feature Metatron.

After getting her Ph.D. in the Study of Religion at Harvard University with a dissertation on the early development of Jewish mysticism prior to Kabbalah, Schiffren taught and pursued writing projects, including contributing to the now-defunct group blog Kesher Talk (where the author of this piece also wrote). While recovering from an extended illness, she decided to parlay her lifelong interest in history and historical fiction into the novel project that became The Mistake.

The main character, a teenager named Marcus, reflects Schiffren’s dual academic interests, with his Jewish mother Miriam and Roman centurion father Julian. Temperamentally and culturally mismatched, Miriam and Julian’s brief romantic encounter produces a son and leaves them connected in the period after the destruction of the second Temple in the years leading to the Bar Kochba Revolt.

Marcus’s conflicts mirror tensions Schiffren also felt: the pull of secular culture against a more constricted religious sphere. “There’s not a lot of freedom in that life, but the positive thing is having a really strong community,” she observes.

With that conflict in mind, she began work on the book, building on what she had learned through her travels and academic studies to give The Mistake a strong sense of authenticity. She always found the Second Temple era and the struggles to reclaim Judean sovereignty fascinating, and that set the time frame of the book. While she knew a lot about the Jewish and Roman worlds of that era, she needed more details, and scoured libraries and bookstores to learn more about topics like Alexander the Great’s military strategies, soldiers’ uniforms and what Roman houses looked like. On a swing through Europe she visited Roman ruins in France and Germany with a friend who was a local art expert and sampled “authentic” Roman cuisine presented on look-alike Roman pottery.

The parental tensions color much of the novel’s action, as Marcus moves between clashing Roman and Jewish cultures. The book excels at showing both in detail, with the Roman military prowess and emphasis on legal paperwork, and the adjustments of Jewish practices in the early rabbinic era after the destruction of the Second Temple. In this passage, Marcus is recovering in the home of a rabbi after a beating by fellow Roman soldiers. The rabbi asks a question:

“Who taught you to speak Hebrew?”

“My mother,” he said. “My grandfather originally. My mother’s father. When I was a baby. He studied in Tiberias, in the Galilee. Years ago.”

“Ah,” said the rabbi. “I see.”

Marcus forced his chin up. He forced himself to look right into the rabbi’s eye. He forced himself to speak. “My father’s Roman. A centurion,” he said. “He wouldn’t allow me to be circumcised.”

The man from the beach spoke across the room. “A mamzer?” he whispered loudly. Shocked.

Marcus turned his head so quickly that the pain stabbed him again. “I’m not a mamzer,” he half shouted, furious at the accusation. A mamzer. The worst kind of insult. The product of incest, or other illicit sex. Outcast. Unable to marry another Jew who was not of the same status. . . .

“Shush, Alexander,” said the rabbi. “The boy is still hurt.” The rabbi turned his head fully away from Marcus to face the other man. “In any case, the sage Rabbi Judah dissents. Holds the child of a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish man is a Jew, not a mamzer. His opinion is good enough for me. So here outside Caesarea, where my opinion hold sway locally, the boy is a Jew, whatever you have heard to the contrary. And that’s enough said for now.”

The Mistake also shows Marcus’s adroit abilities in fighting competitions at a military gym. Schiffren drew on her own sports background, ranging from fencing to soccer to kickboxing, to build out Marcus’s approaches. Her kickboxing instructors gave her ideas about advanced moves that Marcus could use to escape challenging situations. One passage says:

Casio’s sword was sweeping down in a perfect arc that would bang into the crown of his skull. Marcus slipped right, the whoosh of Casio’s sword missing him by less than a finger’s breadth. Dropping into a right-handed roll, he sprung up near Casio, took one more step forward. Just as Casio’s arm swung at him hard, Marcus spun kicked smashing the fingers of Casio’s sword hand against the hilt of his own sword and knew that Casio’s fingers would drop his sword.

Over more than a decade Schiffren worked on the novel, eventually creating a manuscript near to 1,000 pages. She struggled with the ending. Support from the North Salem library writers group and the When Words Count Retreat, a Vermont program for writers who have almost finished their novels, made her realize she needed to break the manuscript into parts. The programs recharged her creative batteries, helping her to create a new ending for Book 1. The retreat program included work with a coach and, when she graduated, a book deal with a publisher. The retreat had a creative pitch program that Schiffren appreciated:

“They created a competition for us, which you don’t have when you’re working on your own. The grit necessary to compete was instrumental in helping me move past my writer’s block and back into a flow state with the writing.”

With The Mistake published, she is now crafting material the rest of it into the sequel, set during the period of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132-135 CE. That sequel should be ready for publication in a year or two. She connects the themes of the book to current history, the Jewish struggle to defend the Land of Israel.

“I want readers to understand the relationship of our people to the land. We were fighting for the land against the Babylonians and the Greco-Syrians and the Romans,” Schiffren explains. “We fought for the land a lot. I want to strengthen people’s connection to the land of Israel and give them a way to know our early history and get interested in it.”