last word
CREATING A PROTAGONIST WITH
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
J oel Burcat claims he didn’t base
his protagonist Mike Jacobs on
himself, but the similarities are
undoubtedly there.

Both are environmental lawyers,
Jewish and attended the Pennsylvania
State University and studied geogra-
phy. But the comparison ends there,
Burcat insisted.

“I often say that he has the DNA
from a lot of different people,” Burcat
said. The Wynnefield native, who now
lives in Harrisburg, is the author of
three environmental legal thriller nov-
els and dozens more short stories. He
has spent the last 15 years pursuing
writing as a passion project, drawing
inspiration from his 38-year law career
and from the everyday.

His most recent novel “Strange Fire,”
published by Headline Books, came
out on Feb 2. The novel, a standalone
piece in the series of three Mike Jacobs
novels, follows Mike as he investigates
a Bradford County water source con-
taminated by fracking. Along the way,
the 29-year-old protagonist falls in love
and grapples with his Jewish identity.

Growing up, Burcat did not neces-
sarily think of himself an author, but
he definitely didn’t intend to become
a lawyer. In fact, he didn’t even think
about law until the Penn State regis-
trar’s office sent him a “nasty letter”
asking him to pick a major.

While a geography degree lends
itself to a career in cartography or city
planning, Burcat was most drawn to
law. A job as assistant attorney general
with the Pennsylvania Department of
Environmental Resources in 1980 set
his career in motion.

Since he began in environmental
law 42 years ago, global warming has
taken a stronger hold on the politics
and culture of the world, Burcat said.

Environmental cases used to be local,
but now focus on the greater global
implications of climate change.

48 Burcat found a love for his unex-
pected career path and found that it
melded effortlessly with his Jewish val-
ues. Burcat, who grew up attending
Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, has
always had a deep sense of his Jewish
values, which he believes bolstered his
work as an environmental lawyer.

“The Torah says, ‘The earth is mine.

You are but strangers and sojourners to
me,’” Burcat said.

His decision to make Mike Jacobs
Jewish was a no-brainer.

“I didn’t know of too many other
Jewish legal thriller heroes, and I felt
that this would be something ... that
MARCH 31, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
hadn’t really been done that much
before,” Burcat said.

But the protagonist isn’t just sym-
bolically Jewish; he’s a practicing Jew
with an odd year of rabbinical school
under his belt. Mike is a “mensch”
trying to figure out how to live out his
Jewish values as a 20-something in the
real world, deciding whether or not to
date Jewish women and, at some points
in the novels, stop practicing Judaism
altogether. Burcat is far from a stranger to exis-
tential crossroads himself. In 2018, he
was diagnosed with nonarteritic ante-
rior ischemic optic neuropathy, which
gave him blood clots in the back of
his eyes, rendering him legally blind
and precipitating a leave of absence-
turned-early retirement from his law
practice. Though he had written fiction for
more than 10 years at that point, it was
in the early days of the disease in 2019
that he wrote “Strange Fire,” which
took only seven weeks to write.

Beyond environmental legal thrillers,
Burcat has written a short story about
beer, a speculative fiction piece about
a small-town police department going
to war with the FBI and a young adult
post-apocalyptic thriller about what
would happen if adults died off in a
pandemic, leaving only teens to survive.

Fiction writing gave Burcat the “awe-
some” feeling of being creative and
the gratification of creating something
educational and accessible to non-law-
yers, he said. Burcat’s extensive law
career helped him craft a realistic nar-
rative, but his understanding of how to
get inside his characters’ heads is what
makes him a good storyteller.

“When people read fiction they’re
looking to be transported; they’re
looking to understand something that
they couldn’t otherwise understand,”
Burcat said. “When you’re writing a
legal thriller, you are transporting
people — not just into a courtroom,
because anybody can go to any court-
room in the United States and sit there
and watch. You’re transporting the
reader into the head of the lawyer.

You’re learning what it is that a lawyer
is thinking about, what his strategy is,
what his tactics are.”
Burcat is working on a fourth book
in the Mike Jacobs series inspired by
the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, in
which thousands of children were
exposed to water contaminated with
lead. He intends to continue the habit
of fiction writing beyond that.

“The words just — it comes from
deep inside you,” Burcat said. “And I
love that feeling.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Joel Burcat
Joel Burcat



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