Aaron Kreuter's ​Lake Burntshore

Reviewed by Rebecca Gross

(ECW, 2025)

For those of us who spent our breaks from school at Jewish summer camp, Aaron Kreuter’s 2025 novel Lake Burntshore brilliantly captures what it feels like to be there: the shenanigans that ensue around a campfire with friends so close that they feel like family; the once-a-session overnight camping excursions that some campers dread while others prize as their favorite activity of the summer; the crushes, romances, jealousies, and heartbreaks of pubescent youth; and, perhaps above all else, the feeling of “being in a tightknit Jewish collective…in a vast country.” Burntshore captures the experience of timelessness, safety, and home-ness that so many of us, year after year as both campers and counselors, returned to camp to find solace in. But Kreuter keenly demonstrates that this comfort is predicated on the insularity that Jewish summer camps across North America maintain. This tendency towards separatism is also the reason many of us, upon leaving home and being confronted with diverse cultural backgrounds and political perspectives, ultimately fell out of love—or at least into a kind of complicated love—with camp. 
 
Kreuter’s protagonist, Ruby Schacter, finds herself subject to these complications while serving as a counselor at Camp Burntshore in the summer of 2013. Ruby is described as a committed anti-Zionist and a college activist who can’t help herself from using her “yelling-into-a-microphone-at-a-protest-voice” for even the most banal argument about which East Coast city has the best bagels. After all, for Ruby, camp is the place to argue about bagels, and not about the real world. Before leaving for the summer, Ruby had told Seema, her Palestinian-Canadian friend from university, that camp was a place where she hoped to “get away from the struggle, to recharge, regroup, and come back to the school year more committed and passionate than ever.” 
 
But Ruby’s plan to use the summer as an escape from the politics of the outside world is foiled when she’s confronted with material reminders of the camp’s geopolitical entanglements: firstly, as an employer of Israeli soldiers visiting for the summer; secondly and relatedly, as an educational institution that promotes Zionist and Israeli propaganda; and lastly, as a colonial force aiming to expand camp boundaries by privatizing and purchasing Indigenous land—which, as Kreuter brilliantly demonstrates, is not as distinct from the first two points as it may seem on the surface. 
 
Kreuter’s prologue situates the terrain on which this braided conflict is set to unfold, introducing readers to the arrogant and chauvinistic Brett—the camp director’s brat-turned-villain adult son who, after a forced hiatus away from camp, is “being groomed, once again, to take over Burntshore” when his father retires. But it quickly becomes clear that Brett has a plan to, inversely, groom the camp to align more with his view of what it means to be Jewish. Brett, arguing that “being Jewish is about one thing, and that’s survival… at all costs,” would like for this ideology to become widespread at camp. Viewing Jewishness as, quintessentially, a performance and enactment of intergenerational trauma, Brett’s brand of “Jewish values” (if we can even call them that) is built entirely on the premise that “never again is now”—but only for Jews. He is a violent and sharp character foil for Ruby, who understands Jewish values to be predicated on the pursuance of justice for all people. For Ruby, camp is a place where she learned to embody these progressive values. Upon learning about Brett’s plan, she sets out to make sure the camp maintains its integrity, and moreover, devises an offensive campaign that would force the camp to reckon with its own imbrications in the history of Canadian settler colonialism.  
 
The central conflict of the novel, then, is between different sets of “Jewish values” and the consequences of either upholding or fighting against them in the diaspora. Kreuter brilliantly shows how these “values” extend beyond the abstract realm to material actions that have effects on real communities of real people: in this case, the Indigenous neighbors of Camp Burntshore. When Brett enacts a plan to privatize and purchase Crown land—what one Israeli Zionist staff member, Dov, calls “empty land across the river” with “resources just sitting there” to be used by Burntshore—this clash between values, and how they are materially staged, comes to a head. 
 
To this end, the novel is also about having one’s commitment to various values tested by a (sometimes conflicting) desire to belong and find love. Over the course of the book, it’s revealed that Brett harbors a sexual interest in Ruby, considering her to be an “infinite ten” on the attraction scale. While sleeping with his camp fling, Fallon (who, for Brett “had always been a four” on the scale), he “thought about Ruby” to be able to climax. Brett’s desire for Ruby initially seems like a contradiction in his character: Why would he want to be with Ruby, who opposes everything he stands for? We come to understand, however, that Brett’s hunger for Ruby is yet another reflection of his subjugative attitude, characterized by his goal to tame all that is unruly and make it his own—Ruby being as wild as the nature surrounding the camp. In the end, then, Brett’s sexual obsession with Ruby aligns with his archetype as the colonizing force at Camp Burntshore.
 
But before this is clarified, we understand Brett’s seemingly out-of-character interest in Ruby as a parallel to Ruby’s own uncharacteristic love for Etai, one of the Israelis that Brett brings to the camp as staff to replace a group of camp counselors who are fired the first week after being caught violating the camp’s drug policy.* Etai stands out among the Israelis as ‘one of the good ones’: He’s a “refusenik,” a conscientious objector to the IDF, and broadly shares Ruby’s politics. But according to Ruby, Etai is still “an Israeli soldier, a soldier who tried to fight back but perhaps didn’t try hard enough,” and she struggles with what it means for her to be in a relationship with him, given this context. Ruby also struggles with breaking this news to Seema, fearing that her friend will view her and Etai’s relationship as a betrayal of their friendship and of the cause for Palestinian liberation more broadly. But in a letter that Ruby writes to Seema at the end of the summer (which coincides with the end of the novel), Kreuter demonstrates that Ruby has made strides toward holding the complexity of Etai’s identity, and her own love for him, with the politics they are both committed to. Ruby’s letter reads: “It’s the system that’s bad… [Etai] was born into his life like we all are, saw what was wrong, and tried to do something about it. I want to try too, Seema. I want to try.” Ruby’s character arc, then, is defined by her political maturation. 
 
In the character of Ruby, Kreuter provides a model of what political growth can look like. Brett, in contrast with Ruby, ends up (literally) in a firestorm of his own inflexibility, his own stuckness in building an identity around a trauma narrative of his own invention. Thus, in demonstrating the diverging paths these two characters take, Kreuter creates an opening for readers to, themselves, follow Ruby’s example and join the struggle against colonization at home and abroad—an invitation that is especially important given the Israeli assault on Gaza over the past 2.5 years.

Kreuter creates a microcosm in Lake Burntshore in which geopolitical conflicts usually set on much larger scales can be boiled down and digested. By narrowing our focus and contextualizing these conflicts in a setting some readers might find nostalgic, the plot of Burntshore shows us that it’s possible to make a difference if we start at the local level, in our communities. The methods that Kreuter employs to tell this story are, too, a model for how we, as writers, might intervene. One way Kreuter does this is through his usage of satire to highlight the absurdity of Zionist propaganda, mobilizing familiar Jewish modes of humor and storytelling against the false and harmful notion that all Jews support the Zionist project. This is best represented by Kreuter’s creation in the novel of a diegetic musical called Tel Aviv!, which he described in an interview as “sort of like the Zionist Hamilton.” Full of Zionist myths put to catchy tunes, the musical takes Burntshore by storm, demonstrating “the power of art to confirm or sway ideology and belief,” as Kreuter, himself, said. If Tel Aviv! is an example of how art might reinforce Zionist propaganda, Burntshore offers a counter-narrative.

*Kreuter paints a picture, however, of this policy as a rule in name only, broken so ubiquitously that it appears suspicious that the counselors would be so careless as to get caught. What, early on in the novel, might seem just a paranoid inkling that this is strange, is ultimately cemented as part of Brett’s master-plan to make the camp his own, “finally have a chance with” Ruby, and infuse the camp with his colonial logics, further implicating him as the villain of the novel.

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​Rebecca Gross is a writer, educator, and PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz in the Literature and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies departments. Her research focuses on contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist writing and art, with specific attention to how the current cultural movement draws on previous iterations of diasporic internationalism.