The dream of lost innocence recovered
in a golden future always haunts the imagination of colonial pioneers. Its
premise is myopia: F. Scott Fitzgerald conjured “a fresh, green breast of the
new world" for his Dutch sailors, a story that began without Indians. Golda Meir
infamously insisted that there was no such thing as Palestinians. Breaking new
ground on a distant shore is easier if no one is there when you arrive. Plan B
allows that the natives are happy to see the newcomers. But soon enough it all
turns nasty and ends in tears.
"A Strange Death," Hillel
Halkin’s beautifully written and wisely confused account of the local history of
the town he lives in, Zichron Yaakov, takes us back to the earliest days of
Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine. His ostensible subjects are members of
the Nili spy ring operated out of Zichron daring World War Ⅰ by local pioneers
on behalf of the British, its ramifications among the local populace and the
betrayals and revenge that floated in its wake. He is deeply seduced, however,
by the lovely ambiguities of the past as they arise in relationships between
Arabs and Jews at a time when both groups were under Turkish rule. Yes, there is
murder just around the corner (Jews were hacked to pieces in Hebron and Arabs
massacred in Deir Yessin) but in 1916 a man could still be known by the horse he
rode from village to village rather than the tank he roiled through
in.
The spy ring ("Nili" is a Hebrew acronym that translates as
"the strength of Israel will not lie"), which functioned less than a year from
the winter of 1916 through the fail of 1917, was the brainchild of Aaron
Aaronsohn and Avshalom Feinberg, two Palestine-born Zionists convinced that a
British victory over the Turks would help pave the way to a Jewish state.
Aaronsohn was a charismatic figure with an international reputation as a
botanist (he discovered triticum dioccoides, the wild ancestor of cultivated
wheat). Feinberg, a local farmer, was a swashbuckler, a superior shot and
impressive horseman. Aaronsohn brought two of his sisters into the ring: Rivka,
who was engaged to Feinberg, and the beautiful and spirited Sarah. At 24, Sarah
had abandoned her Turkish Jewish husband in Constantinople and had witnessed, on
her journey to Palestine, the Turks’ genocidal assault on the Armenians. The
network was augmented by Yosef Lishansky, a maverick adventurer and a tough guy,
and a few more trusted relatives of the two leaders.
The
likelihood of the spies living to comb gray hair wasn’t enhanced by the
anxieties of some Jews. After a successful run passing information on Turkish
troop positions to a British freighter waiting offshore came the inevitable
capture, torture and interrogation of an operative, Naaman Belkind, and soon
enough the jig was up. In October 1917, the Turks cordoned off Zichron.
Aaronsohn was luckily in Cairo at the time. Lishansky escaped only to be caught
after three weeks, and hanged by the Turks. Sarah was captured and marched
through town. Four Jewish women abused, excoriated and perhaps assaulted her,
but whether they acted out of animosity or an instinct for self-preservation has
never been clear. After being tortured by Turkish soldiers Sarah escaped to her
own home long enough to retrieve a hidden gun and shoot herself.
Nothing is at it was, and perhaps it never was as Halkin supposed. In an
empty house he finds a discarded, anonymous book, "Sarah, Flame of the Nili." A
little research reveals that the hagiography was written by Alexander Aaronsohn,
Sarah’s younger brother, who, Halkin also finds out, had a penchant for
pubescent girls well beyond his own adolescence. The countryside was thinly
populated and the grass grew high; there are secrets in Zichron. At the end of
the book, the town has health food stores, gift and antique shops and ice cream
parlors. But it has lost its soul.
A riot of names in "A Strange
Death" sometimes threatens to overwhelm the reader -- as if Haikin wants to
honor every inhabitant. The poet Stanley Kunitz once heard a voice telling him
to "live in the layers." Halkin’s book lives wonderfully in the layers but the
layers, of course -- a millennium or two of who did what to whom and when --
disturb everybody in his part of the world. |
