Born in Israel and a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, Omer Bar­tov is an acclaimed his­to­ri­an of Nazi Ger­many, the world wars, and the Holo­caust. His book, Anato­my of a Geno­cide (2018), won the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award. Bar­tov pub­lished two nov­els in Israel in the 1980s. The But­ter­fly and the Axe is his first Eng­lish-lan­guage work of fiction.