THE MARTYRDOM OF STEPHEN WERNER

by Roberta Kalechofsky

pbk.    107 pgs

Description

The novella is a religious allegory about Christians, Jews and others. The locale is the boundary between Guyana and Brazil, in a place on the map designated as "area in dispute." Those words are symbolic of the territory of the Bible, as it belongs to both Christians and Jews.

The plot was inspired by an account in National Geographic of a Passion play among Yucatan Indians, who had been converted in the mid 18th century by two Jesuit missionaries, and had then lost contact with the "outside" world. Nevertheless they had retained sufficient religious continuity with their original experience to recite the Mass in Latin and to perform a Passion Play,with tribal interpolations, in which the evil forces are represented at "los Judios." The book is about the tenacity of an idea.

Stephen's Passion was translated into Italian and published in Italy..