Patrick E. Craig is our guest this week again on The Story behind the Story. It’s always good to have him along. This time, he’s sharing a little about what inspired him to write the book with the fascinating title The Amish Menorah. Let’s hear a little about the book that’s part of the compilation, The Amish Menorah and Other Stories.

Six short stories by the men of Amish fiction to entertain and educate you. You’ll journey with an Amish man and the Jewish woman whose life he saves (The Amish Menorah by Patrick E. Craig), agonize with an Amish girl in love with an Englische man (A Cloudy Day by Willard Carpenter), fret with two sisters both in love with the same man (When Hearts Break by Jerry Eicher), pray with the family whose child is injured in a fall (The Silo by Thomas Nye), work with the Amish sheriff in a western town (Lone Star by Murray Pura), and laugh at the girl forced to be Amish for the summer (Amish For The Summer by Amos Wyse.)

So, Patrick, what inspired you to write this story?

I’m one of seven or eight men who write Amish fiction.  I’m always on the lookout for interesting Amish tidbits. When I was doing research for a World War II story I was writing with Murray Pura, I decided to look for information on the Amish in Europe. To my surprise I discovered that there are no more Amish communities in Europe and there have not been any since 1937.

The last Amish community was in Ixheim, Germany, a small village on the border with France near the town of Saarbrücken. This town is in the heart of the region known as the Rhineland, an area that includes the Saar, Moselle, and Rhine rivers. The item piqued my interest. What could have caused this Amish community to cease to exist? 

Then I remembered that in late 1936, Adolf Hitler launched the first of a series of political and military moves that ultimately led to war with France. In the fall of that year he marched his army back into the demilitarized Rhineland and occupied it, hoping to provoke France and England into a military response. One of the towns he occupied was Saarbrucken. At the same time there was a definite rise in the roundup of Jewish people by the Nazis, particularly those who were members of the Communist party.

I only had one Wikipedia entry about Ixheim to go by so my imagination took over and I made up my own story about why the Amish presence in Europe came to an end. Here’s how it goes: a young Amish farmer who has been named as the next head elder of the Ixheim community finds a Jewish girl hiding in his barn. They fall in love and when he tells the other elders, they put him under the Meidung, the shunning. He refuses to repent and through the events of the story, which I won’t spoil, he ends up leaving. Because there is no one left to take over as elder, the community joins with the Mennonite church and the last Amish community in all of Europe ceased to exist.

And that’s the story behind The Amish Menorah. You can find it in the men of Amish Fiction’s newly released The Amish Menorah and Other Stories. The anthology includes stories by me, Murray Pura, Jerry Eicher, Thomas Nye, Willard Carpenter and Amos Wyse and is available in eBook and Print format and in many bookstores and is published by Elk Lake Publishing.

Amazon Best-Selling author Patrick E. Craig, is a lifelong writer and musician who left a successful music career to become a pastor in 1986. In 2007 he retired to concentrate on writing and publishing fiction books. In 2011, Patrick signed a three-book deal with Harvest House Publishers to publish his Apple Creek Dreams series. His self-published books, The Amish Heiress, The Amish Princess, and The Mennonite Queen, as well as the reprinted Apple Creek Dreams are now published by Patrick’s imprint, P&J Publishing. In 2017, Harlequin Publishing purchased The Amish Heiress for their Walmart Amish series and released it in April 2019.

Patrick and co-author Murray Pura have just released Far On The Ringing Plains, Book 1 in a nine book series that will take in the whole sweep of men and women at war from WW II to the current Desert Campaigns. The have also collaborated on an anthology of realistic Amish stories written with the four other men who write Amish fiction: Willard Carpenter, Jerry Eicher, Thomas Nye and Amos Wyse. The Amish Menorah and Other Stories was published by Elk Lake Publishing in May of 2020. He has also recently released two books in his YA mystery series, The Adventures of Punkin and Boo, with Elk Lake Publishers. They are The Mystery of Ghost Dancer Ranch and The Lost Coast. Patrick and his wife Judy live in Idaho. They have two daughters and five grandchildren. 

Where can readers find Patrick online?

www.patrickecraig.com  Webpage
https://www.facebook.com/PatrickECraig  Facebook https://twitter.com/PatrickECraig  Twitter

Where can readers purchase his books? http://tinyurl.com/n6sfagg Amazon Any of the other online stores.

Patrick will be giving away a signed copy of The Amish Menorah. U.S. addresses only. Follow the directions below to enter.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thanks for joining us, Patrick!