ABSTRACT
“Our faith,” a Bishop of Galway once proclaimed, “is not superficial but goes down to our roots, to our grass roots, and pervades every aspect of family and social life.” That Pete Hamill, the former editor in chief of New York’s Daily News, despite repeated public declarations of his atheism, confirms the Bishop’s proclamation in his latest popular novel, Snow in August,10 is beyond question. Rooted once in his Catholic faith, he uses it effectively, but only after combining it with some aspects of Judaism and secular Americanism, to broaden the in-tensity of belief as it affects the development of his fictional mode. Hence, to alert the reader to the workings of faith, as it evolves in this novel, he inserts two epigraphs, one, from Hebrews 11:1, “How faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”; the other, a popular Yiddish maxim, “A Jew can’t live without miracles.”
