Jews have a long history of creating what their community needs. For Michelle Reichert, that extends to superheroes.

Her debut book, “The Adventures of Gefilda Fische,” was born from a realization she had while recovering from a grueling cancer treatment regimen in 2022. At that time, she and her then-teenage daughter watched a lot of reality television, including a competition show for makeup artists that included a superhero challenge. Reichert wondered if there were any Jewish superheroes.

“We didn’t find much,” she said of her and her daughter’s investigation of that question, “and I said, ‘we should make one.’”

Later that night, Reichert did exactly that. Her family awoke the next morning to find a sketch of a woman with wild hair and circular-frame eyeglasses with a shopping cart.

“It’s full of antique relics,” Reichert told her family. “She’s going to collect Jewish relics and fight demons.”

Her heroine was born.

A religious school teacher by day, Gefilda Fische spends her off-hours battling demons from Jewish lore with the aid of a collection of relics she stores in a shopping cart and a nearly superhuman dose of chutzpah.

“There’s always a tension for her on whether she is attracting the demons or fighting the demons. Are they following her because she has this great shopping cart full of relics or is she showing up there to defend them?” Reichert said. “She’s a little bit grumpy and a little bit sassy and lots of fun.”

Creating the main character was, perhaps, the easy part of the process. The stories that Reichert’s heroine finds herself in, the other characters she encounters and the relics she uses to protect her community are all the product of extensive research, with just a few creative liberties taken.

“There’s definitely some mythological and historical references to things, and I try to be true to that where possible, but I try to take some leeway,” the author said. “There’s a character that shows up in [the yet-unpublished second book] who’s loosely based on a portion of Esther that I read about that Esther was suckled at her father’s breast. I’m like, ‘Her father was a trans man!’ So, she’s actually a trans character.”

Reichert didn’t base Gefilda Fische on herself, she explained, but certain aspects of her worldview have certainly made their way in. Reichert mentioned a passage where her heroine is teaching swordplay to some companions, explaining that it doesn’t have to be technically perfect so long as one doesn’t get stabbed.

“It’s kind of like my philosophy about prayer, right? The intention matters more than the words,” Reichert said. “If you intend the prayer to mean the thing, it means the thing, to me anyway. [Fische] really has that philosophy.”

There are a lot of opportunities for sword play – one of the challenges Reichert found through her research was that a large percentage of the relics of Jewish mythology are swords. But there’s also a lot of humor – the creation of which was a valuable outlet for Reichert during her cancer treatment.

“That’s how I try to cope with things,” she said. “The worst things get, the worst my puns get. But I think it’s big fun, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about the Jewish mythology behind all of it.”

Having written poetry and short stories in college, she also learned how to craft a longer story along the way. The first seven chapters of “The Adventures of Gefilda Fische” originally debuted on the serial publishing platform Kindle Vella before she reached a contract with Pegasus Publishing for the first two books.

“That actually was super helpful for how to structure a chapter,” Reichert said of her experience with Kindle Vella, “because structuring a chapter is different than a short story.”

The whole experience has been helpful in a different way – while she was going through treatment, counselors told her she needed to reinvent herself but offered little advice on how to do so.

It turns out her reinvention came on the back of an envelope in the middle of the night.

“This is it,” Reichert said. “It was my reinvention.”

“The Adventures of Gefilda Fische” is available at Powell’s Books, Broadway Books, and at major booksellers. The second book in the three-part series has been accepted by Pegasus Publishing, but a publication date has not been set; the third book is in progress, and Reichert has plans for two prequels, including an origin story for the shopping cart. More information, as well as Gefilda Fische merchandise, is available online at gefildafische.com.