TEXT B
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 W the earliest days of Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine. His ostensible subjects are members of the Nili spy ring operated out of Zichron during 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 wiled 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 fall 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. Aarousobn 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 Halkin 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 g a millennium or two of who did what to whom and when—disturb everybody in his pan of the world.
This book is______