Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel

I try my best to like people.To expect good from them. If you see someone as a monster, it is as good as attaching a real horn to them and poking them with a hot metal poker. I really do think so. In order to avoid turning people into monsters by suspecting them of being monsters, I do my best to keep mostly to myself.

In 1618, as the Thirty Years' War gets going, plague is a constant threat and life is generally harsh, an elderly woman living in a small town in what is now Germany is accused of witchcraft. An unremarkable occurrence, but in this case the woman's son is Johannes Kepler -- astronomer, mathematician and a key player in the scientific revolution. From this historical tidbit, Rivka Galchen has written this novel.

Katharina show more Kepler is a woman who has survived to old age, supporting herself and quietly living her life. She loves her garden and Chamomile, her cow. When she is accused, she goes for help to her neighbor who is both a man and literate, who carefully helps her write down her defense. But the odds aren't in her favor, despite the help of her adult children.

Galchen has written a wonderful novel that is a character study of Katharina and her neighbor as well as a portrait of daily life at a time of turmoil and scarcity. She manages that difficult balance, of making her characters fully inhabit their time and place and of making them feel like real people. show less

"She was a frighteningly intelligent woman--also a fool."
Simon Satler, friend of Katharina Kepler

I love this book! But I am disheartened. It has, in GR standards, a lowly rating of 3.39. That's unfathomable to me. So I am here to try to convince you to read this one in spite of its rating.

Especially if you are an old broad like me who enjoys reading about old kickass broads.

Author Rivka Galchen created a living, breathing woman reconstituted from the dry pages of 17c European history, seventy-something year old Katharina, the real mother of early astronomer Johannes Kepler (his work was crucial to Sir Isaac Newton's own). Once when Johannes was six years old, Katharina brought him to an elevated point in order to view the major comet show more in 1577.

Already you gotta love her, right?

Between the years of 1615-1621 she was on trial for her life, after being accused of being a witch by a woman whose name has gone down in history as the disingenuous perpetrator of lies that could result in Katharina being burned or beheaded. A deception that caught like wildfire, playing into the deep superstitions of villagers whose lives are epitomized by the expression "nasty, brutish and short." Their hearsay evidence, recounted fictionally (but realistically), was an eye-opener of the incredible variety of transparent and terrible reasons a person might convince themselves they knew Katharina (or any woman or man) to be a witch.

Katharina's real crime? She was old. She also was a widow. She possessed some modest property. That is, she was society's vulnerable. She sold herbal packets to help fever, skin ailments, stomach troubles--herbs being mankind's early medicines, sometimes helpful, sometimes not, always fodder for witch accusations. Worse, she could be seen out and about during daylight not acting demure, not invisible enough to suit some.

I loved her for that independence, her lack of kowtowing, not out of pride but out of just getting on with life. You know that saying, "Dance as if no one was watching?" That's the way Katharina lived her life, perhaps foolishly as her sons and her friend Simon thought. I don't mean she lived in exuberance--far from it, she could be quite dour and cynical--but that she lived her life going about her business, helping others, showing compassion, having an opinion, speaking up, as if no one was watching. But they were.

She was a woman of her time and had her own silly superstitions as well--she didn't approve of strawberries because they grew too close to the earth's foul vapors. She had secret nicknames for people she disliked--werewolf, fake unicorn, and my favorite of the nicknames, cabbage.

She loved Martin Luther. She loved her children, her grandchildren, and her cow, Chamomile who she said had the eyes of her father and the soul of a favorite young granddaughter who died of an unidentified and sudden disease, a death she bore but grieved for a long time.

She also loved her friend and socially reclusive/awkward neighbor, Simon. The first words of the novel are Katharina's, written down by Simon for her, as her "truest testimony" she calls it. From the get-go we know we are meeting a person worth meeting. In the end, the friendship is strained by the trial, by Simon's own woes, and the burden their friendship had on him. Later, she says to him, so wisely, so compassionately, "You've been a friend to me. In the ways that were available to you."

Back to even that first written testimony, she knows herself and her predicament, how alone she truly is in a way that old crones do:

"There are two things a woman must do alone; she does her own believing and her own dying."

I love this book! show less

Katharina Kepler finds herself in hot water when Ursula Reinbold accuses her of witchcraft, namely, of giving her poisoned wine that makes her sick. Frau Kepler then turns around and accuses Ursula of slander - but instead of her charge being taken seriously, more and more neighbors come out of the woodwork to say that the old woman has harmed them or their children or their animals in some way.

Told primarily as Katharina's telling her literate neighbor and court guardian, Simon, her side of the story, interspersed with Simon's comments and transcripts of trial testimony, this historical fiction tale imagines what the full story behind Johannes Kepler's mother might have been. Galchen seamlessly blends real and imagined figures to tell show more a compelling tale of an opinionated old woman and the misunderstandings, friendships, jealousies and more that arise in her small community in Wurttemberg. Compelling and maddening reading. show less

What a curious, yet delightful novel. Katharina Kepler is an elderly widow. She is the mother of the noted astronomer, Johannes Kepler. She is kind to neighbours and to cows. Yet her kindness is rewarded with envy, aggression, and calumny. She is accused of witchcraft. The charge, of course, is a nonsense spurred on by a grasping desire to make a profit off her pain. Despite the absurdity of the charge, Katharina, her children, her neighbour, Simon, and others must fight the charge for nearly all the remaining years of her life.

Katharina is a wonderful character, gentle and wise, despite her lack of schooling. But she lives in a world that is fallen. Wars, both secular and religious, sweep across the land. Plague regularly breaks out. show more The plague of ignorance is even more virulent. What is most surprising, perhaps, then is that Katharina remains the kind, gentle person she has always been.

Rivka Galchen found something in the historical record that inspired her fictional account of Katharina’s troubles. But it is her genius that paints this picture with humour and grace and a willingness to be generous to the disappointment that some people bring into the world. It’s a most unusual subject for a novel, yet it totally works.

Gently recommended. show less

Rivka Galchen's Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a work of fiction based on the real world witchcraft trial of Katharina Kepler, mother of the ground-breaking astronomer Johannes Kepler. Two rather well-known works of nonfiction documenting this event have been published: James A. Connor's Kepler's Witch (2004) and Ulinka Rublack's The Astronomer and the Witch (2015). Galchen credits the second of those titles as the inspiration for her novel. Galchen worked with a broad body of historical works in writing her novel, but makes it very clear that she is writing fiction that uses a real-world event as a jumping off point. Her novel is not narrativized history.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch offers a simultaneously absurd, show more disturbing, and thought-provoking reading experience. The absurdity comes from Galchen's depiction of Katherina, who she pictures as an opinionated, cantankerous, but warm-hearted, women. Much of the book is written in Katherina's voice, and Katherina's description of a daughter in law and of her astronomer son give a taste of this.

Of the daughter in law, married to another of Katherina's sons, and who has a taste for the kind of scandalous pamphlets that were that day's equivalent of the scandal-sheets we see at grocery check-out lines: "Gertie loved to hear about the miser whose heart was found in a chest with his jewels after he died. About the holy nun who married the Moor who kidnapped her. She'll read any pamphlet she can get. It makes me not mind that I can't read myself."

Of Johannes: "he's made his way in the world the easy way, through his studies."

Katharina loves her children, but she seems to love her cow Chamomile every bit as much.

The lengthy sections in Katharina's voice are accompanied by a narrative in the voice of a mild-mannered, controversy-averse neighbor who plays the role of Katharina's legal guardian, as women were not allowed to represent themselves in legal proceedings. (There was a neighbor who had this role in real-life, but Galchen makes it clear that her version of the neighbor is completely fictive.) Like Katharina, Simon, the neighbor, has a wry way of putting things. Describing himself listening to the drunken ramblings of Katherina's son Christoph, Simon notes "I said nothing. If there were a guild of non-sayers, that would be my guild. That's also the guild of standing by."

As one reads and as the accusations against Katharina grow in number and unlikelihood, the narrative becomes disturbing. Clearly some of those accusing Katharina have ulterior motives: they hope to be awarded parts of her land or a financial payout if Katharina is convicted. Others seem absolutely genuine in their accusations, which are often memories of past events they didn't note at the time. In this world, correlation equals causation, even if the things being correlated are only dimly remembered. What can Katharina do to defend herself when anyone can suddenly recall seeing her just before a horse went lame, their children became sick, or they broke out in a rash?

This leads me to what I found to be a particularly thought-provoking aspect of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch. What is it like to live in a world where witchcraft is seen as a more likely cause of suffering than ill luck? To what extent do accusers sincerely believe they are protecting their community? To what extent are they actually clamoring for a role in the public spectacle a witchcraft trial becomes?

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch offers a compelling read that rewards in multiple ways. Any lover of well-crafted plot- and character-driven driven fiction should appreciate it. And it may lead some readers to Connor and Rublack's books to explore the history behind Galchen's tale.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less

I really admired Katharina's strength, forthrightness, and independence. But what a sharp tongue! Much of the story is told in the first person, mostly Katharina or her neighbor Simon, almost as if they are giving witness to the events that lead to Katharina's imprisonment. I was amazed at how well Galchen captured the [presumable] speech patterns of the 1600's, and then I read the Acknowledgements at the end and saw that the tale was based on a real even, and how much research was involved in presenting this story.
Kudos to Galchen.
People who want an easy, light-hearted read might not be happy with this book, but I highly recommend it to any thinking person. As I read, I was very aware of how rumors in our current society breed hatred show more and divisiveness, just as was happening in the early 1600's. Haven't we made any progress? show less

Historical novels which deal with real people can be tricky - stray too far away and what was the point in starting with the actual person; stay too close and it feels like you wanted to tell the story but did not want to do the complete research to make it a history book. In this novel Rivka Galchen found the happy middle ground between the two - the place where these kinds of novels work the best.

In 1615, Katharina Kepler was accused of being a witch. In case the name rings a bell but does not connect - she is the mother of Johannes Kepler, one of the key mathematicians, astronomers and astrologers (and a few more things - the sciences and pseudo-sciences are still the same thing at that point - he considered himself a mathematician) show more of the 17th century that allowed later scientists to understand astronomy and physics. Galchen takes this story and builds a novel around it, keeping it as close to the real history but with enough fictional elements and changes to make it work as a novel. You do not need to know the real story - if you do, you know how the story must end - neither you need to know anything about the 17th century really.

Katharina is a widow, living alone in Leonberg (with her cow). She cannot write or read so when she decides to tell us her story, it is a neighbor, Simon, who records it for her 4 years into the trial. At the time when that happens, she is in her 70s so her account is anything but linear - she talks about the trial and about her own past; the record is started in 1619 so there is an element of unreliable narrator in there. This journal/account forms the base of the book - it gets interspersed with Simon's notes, letters (from different people) and the transcripts of the testimony of the people who had been interviewed for her trial.

One of the traps in writing this kind of novels is to make the main character too good - the author trying too hard to win the reader's sympathy. Katharina is anything but - for most of the book, she is the know-it-all, better than everyone matriarch who does not believe that bad things can happen to her - not this kind of things anyway. As more than one character says in the novel - she made her own trouble in a way. And despite that, you cannot stop being on her side - the whole trial is as ridiculous as most of the other witch trials on both sides of the Atlantic.

Katharina may be the local grandmother who never knows when to keep her peace (you probably had one of those or knew one just like that once upon a time) but when the accusers start elaborating, the biggest issue seems to be that she simply does not behave the way a widow should behave. Which in the early days of the 17th century is a reason enough for a woman to be suspect and once someone in the town accuses her (for reason that were never made clear besides just looking to do harm), everything bad seems to be now caused by her - animals getting sick or dying, people getting sick or dying -- suddenly everyone remembers Katharina having been there. If you ever lived in a small place, a place where everyone knows everyone, that rings true and even more so in the superstitious 17th century.

The novel is full of history - not the big history you tend to get in school but the daily things - how people lived, how they survived what was thrown at them (although the Big history does intervenes - a war is a war no matter how small and insignificant you are), how the world worked. Katharina loses everything she had long before her trial actually ends - she needs to pay for her prison guards and all other legal expenses even if she has no saying in where and how she in imprisoned.

At the end, it does not matter how the trial ends. Galchen handles that masterfully - the story ends with the last speech of the accusers and then jumps a dozen or so years, with Simon trying to sell Katharina's story, long after she is dead. The point of the novel is the trial and the devastation it caused in everyone's lives. It is not just the story of one woman and one trial; it is the story of a time and place, using the single story as a vehicle. We learn how this specific story ends but it is an afterthought.

With all this being said, this should have been one of my favorite novels this year. But something is off - something just did not connect completely. The middle drags and after a powerful start the novel never reaches the same level - the end is definitely better than the middle but nowhere close to the start. It is not a bad or really a disappointing novel but it is possible that the choice to tell the story completely in the voices of the participants was a bit miscalculated - especially because that did not allow a lot of the secondary characters to shine - for example Maruschl, who Katharina is very fond of, sounds less defined than the cow Chamomile. But then Katharina cared about the cow a lot more at the end anyway (or so it felt). So maybe that was part of the point. But it just did not work completely for me. And yet, it is a novel worth checking. show less