Jacob Hochstetler is a peace-loving Amish settler on the Pennsylvania frontier when Native American warriors, goaded on by the hostilities of the French and Indian War, attack his family one September night in 1757. Taken captive by the warriors and grieving for the family members just killed, Jacob finds his beliefs about love and nonresistance severely tested.
Jacob endures a hard winter as a prisoner in an Indian longhouse. Meanwhile, some members of his congregation—the first Amish settlement in America—move away for fear of further attacks.
Based on actual events, Jacob's Choice describes how one man's commitment to pacifism leads to a season of captivity, a complicated romance, an unrelenting search for missing family members, and an astounding act of forgiveness and reconciliation.
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...<p>“In this evocative and gripping story, Ervin Stutzman details the love, the loss, and restoration of Jacob as fervently as Jacob pursued his own rebirth from the ashes of a terrible past. All of this occurs within the stunningly depicted confines of Amish life and history.”</p>Sherry Gore, Reviews
<p>“Ervin Stutzman’s intimately imaginative entrée into the most famous Amish experience in colonial America is woven around documented historical and geographical data. <i>Jacob’s Choice</i> will confront readers with equally inescapable choices of our own.”</p>John Ruth, Reviews
<p>“Using historical facts and a vivid imagination, Ervin Stutzman does a beautiful narration of nonresistant Amish life.”</p>Sam Stoltzfus, Reviews
<p>“This novel of Amish life in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania allows us to imagine the joys, tears, doubts, and religious devotion of the earliest Amish immigrants. In retelling the story of the Hochstetler massacre, Stutzman reminds us that the family was real and that their sacrifice was both a human tragedy and a triumph of faith.”</p>Karen Johnson-Weiner, Reviews
<p>“Stutzman’s keen knowledge of time and place brings to life the Hochstetler family’s testing through the Indian attack and captivity and their commitment to Anabaptist values. Nonresistance, forgiveness—and romance—are just some of the choices this most widely known family in the original pioneer Amish settlement must make.”</p>Daniel Hochstetler, Reviews