Lake Burntshore by Aaron Kreuter

Lake Burntshore, the debut novel from acclaimed author Aaron Kreuter, is the hardest working book about teenage stoners at a summer camp you’re likely to read. What it manages to accomplish is nothing short of remarkable. It is premature to refer to the book as Kreuter’s magnum opus, as he still has a long career ahead, the scope of the novel, the history it packs, and the weight of centuries of choices, all bear down on the characters.

Set in 2013, in Ontario’s cottage country, the eponymous Lake Burntshore is a Jewish summer camp which borders Black Spruce First Nation. That summer, due to numerous violations of the camp’s rules, mostly revolving around marijuana possession, the camp is short on counselors. To alleviate the shortage, the camp’s owner brings in a half-dozen IDF soldiers, who work double duty as counselors and de facto ambassadors of the state of Israel. What we get is summer camp, a hot and humid place filled with sweaty, horny and stoned teenagers fending off bug bites and breakups, mixed with heavy politics and history.

Lake Burntshore offers an ensemble cast, though we can’t help but follow Ruby, a counselor who is a student activist at York University and a staunch anti-Zionist. Her best friend back home, Seema, is a Palestinian whose family was forced to take refuge in Jordan before coming to Toronto. While at camp, Ruby falls in love with Etai, one of the IDF soldiers. Although Etai objects to the occupation of Palestinian territories, and refuses deployment, he still wears the uniform of a military enmeshed in war crimes and human rights violations.

Kreuter’s handling of complex history, culture, faith and politics, weaving them seamlessly into the lives of teenage potheads and horndogs, is masterful.

Lake Burntshore is a coming-of-age, summer camp story that explores not only teens deciding what kind of adults they’d like to be, but young Jews discovering for themselves as individuals, what it means to be Jewish. For some of them, that means a connection to Israel, for others, it means the embrace of diasporic traditions. It was refreshing to see a broad swath of Jewish society portrayed in this book, with many diverse opinions and positions. Too frequently, in Western media, Jewish thought is portrayed as monolithic, and Zionist ideology is misrepresented as synonymous with Judaism. Kreuter recognizes this, and offers, through his many characters, many different takes on what Judaism means to them, not conflating the century-old political ideology of Zionism with the thousands of years of Jewish cultural and religious traditions.

Through the everyday operations of a Jewish summer camp, we confront many of the questions that face contemporary Jewish society. At the beginning of the summer, there’s a debate among the campers as to which city makes the best bagels, Montreal, Toronto or New York. Towards the end of the book, when the debate arises once more, Dov, the alpha of the IDF soldiers, condemns bagels as the food of “diaspora weakness.” In many ways, Dov represents what the Zionist leader Max Nordau called “muscular Judaism” in the 1890s. Nordau rejected the “old Jew,” the diasporic Jew, and called for a new kind of Jew; muscular, aggressive, Zionist. Dov carries that image throughout Lake Burntshore, he is bold, strong, able, a natural leader. When he condemns diaspora food like bagels, he elevates “Israeli food” such as hummus and falafel. Ruby has to step in and remind him that what he considers “Israeli” was appropriated from the Arabs of the region.

Through Yehuda, another of the IDF soldiers and a true believer in the Zionist project, we get to view Judaism through the lens of Herzl and other early Zionist thinkers. When Ayelet Cho speaks to him about languages, he condemns Arabic as the language of the enemy, which, in a nutshell, encapsulates the decades of discrimination the Mizrahim, or Arabic-speaking Jews had to endure when they came to Israel after its formation. Yehuda also considers Ayelet half-Jewish, since her father is Chinese. This seems like an artifact of early Zionist thinking, which was as obsessed with race as the other ethnonationalist political ideologies coming out of Europe at the time.

The book reaches its climax when Brett, the son of the camp’s owner, makes a move to purchase many acres of the Crown land surrounding the camp. This puts the Jewish campers at odds with the local Indigenous people who live nearby (some of whom work in the camp). It forces the campers, Ruby most of all, to come face-to-face with the continuing colonial practices.

Kreuter’s handling of complex history, culture, faith and politics, weaving them seamlessly into the lives of teenage potheads and horndogs, is masterful. At one point, some campers sneak into the Zionist doctor’s office and add Palestinian and non-Zionist books to the collection the doctor uses to influence campers towards his cause. It both introduces Zionist and anti-Zionist politics and history, while being the kind of puerile prank that teenage radicals would attempt. Like many bildungsromans, the characters are asking who they are. In Lake Burntshore, that question is extended to include who the characters are as Jews, and who they are as citizens of land stolen from Indigenous peoples.

Kreuter brings us long, hot days, waves lapping against the shore, fireside guitar sing-a-longs and sex. He gives us young people trying to find their way in the world and find their tribe. He does so not only while grappling with heavy subjects, but while portraying the beauty and richness of Jewish diasporic culture. The novel asks hard questions, but is so infused with humanity that the reader will set it down with the satisfaction of having taken a nice summer vacation. The chapter titles inject the fun of a Wes Anderson film into the book, adding a little campiness to the camp story.

AARON KREUTER is the author of four books, including the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award shortlisted poetry collection Shifting Baseline Syndrome. His other books are Arguments for Lawn Chairs, You and Me, Belonging, and Leaving Other People Alone (UAlberta Press). He lives in Toronto and teaches at Trent University.

Publisher: ECW Press (April 22 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 408 pp
ISBN: 9781770417632

Jeff Dupuis

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Jeff Dupuis is a writer and editor living in Toronto. He is the author of The Creature X Mystery novels and numerous short stories, which have been published in The Ex-Puritan and The Temz Review among others. Jeff is the editor, alongside A.G. Pasquella, of the anthology Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, which will be published in 2025 by Dundurn Press.