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'A Strange Death': Four Angry Women

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  • 'A Strange Death': Four Angry Women

    New York Times
    July 9 2005

    'A Strange Death': Four Angry Women


    By JONATHAN WILSON
    Published: July 10, 2005

    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 (whose
    fault?) and ends in tears.

    A STRANGE DEATH
    By Hillel Halkin.
    388 pp. PublicAffairs. $26.

    First Chapter: 'A Strange Death' (July 10, 2005)

    Forum: Book News and Reviews
    ''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 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
    rolled 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. 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.

    What happened to the four angry women is Halkin's quest.
    Particularly, was one of them, Perl Appelbaum, murdered in revenge by
    Sarah's friends in Zichron Yaakov? As Halkin searches for an answer
    nobody provides one, but his compensation is a stream of great
    stories about old times. Zichron began as the fief of Baron Edmond de
    Rothschild, who would blow in at odd intervals from France to bowing
    and scraping. By 1970, when the Halkins move in, the village has a
    cranky charm and wild flowers growing in crevices of half-abandoned
    structures that seem like a playground for Joseph Beuys. Halkin, a
    product of the new Israel, clearly finds it hard to let go of old
    Palestine, in halcyon days when crafty Jews and wily Arabs,
    farmer-scholar-horsemen all, took their disputes to the Turkish
    governor for arbitration. A revealing moment comes when Halkin takes
    his kids to play with Bedouin children who steal his daughters' toys.
    Halkin wants to take a liberal-romantic line on this violation, but
    his wife sets him straight. The Bedouin mother ''sleeps with the
    farmers' sons. . . . Everyone knows except you. You'd know too, if it
    had happened 50 years ago.''

    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 -- a millennium or two of who did what to whom and
    when -- disturb everybody in his part of the world.

    Jonathan Wilson's most recent book is ''An Ambulance Is on the Way:
    Stories of Men in Trouble.''
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