Kaplan will help launch the program with a book-signing Sunday at Old York Road Temple-Beth Am in Abington.
One Book director Rabbi Phil Warmflash says Kaplan's novel is a perfect fit for the program. "It is wonderfully written and wonderfully engaging," he says. "It talks about an interesting period in Jewish history which also has incredible implications for modern Jewish life."
Warmflash says the literacy program, which drew nearly 10,000 participants last year, will feature dozens of events through March in Philadelphia and the suburbs.
Kaplan, 53, became fascinated by late-15th-century Spain because it was riddled with contradictions: It was an era of radical advances, but also of massive repression.
"So much was going on," he says, "so much intolerance and disintegration - yet out of that came a man [Columbus] who discovered a place where tolerance becomes the law of the land."
Despite its epic sweep, By Fire, By Water is also an intimate portrait of a remarkable individual named Luis de Santángel, who becomes entangled in political intrigue and religious persecution. Santángel was King Ferdinand's real-life court chancellor and a trusted confidant. He had power and influence.
He was also a Jew.
Santángel's family long ago had converted to Christianity so they could advance in Spanish society. But like other so-called conversos, Santángel was suspected by the Spanish Inquisition of being a "secret Judaizer," and was eventually accused of assassinating a high-ranking Inquisitor.
Santángel sparked Kaplan's imagination because he stood in the midst of four cataclysmic events that helped shape the modern world: Columbus' voyage; the Inquisition; the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; and the conquest of Muslim-controlled Grenada and the unification of Spain.
