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Tag Archives: British Mandate

Murder in the Mandate: The Red Balcony

22 Monday May 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1933, anti-Semitism, book review, British Mandate, colonialism, emigration, historical fiction, identity crisis, Jerusalem, Jonathan Wilson, legal investigation, literary fiction, love affair, murder, Palestine, politics, revolutionaries, rivalries, spinelessness, Tel Aviv

Review: The Red Balcony, by Jonathan Wilson
Schocken, 2023. 274 pp. $27

In March 1933, a Jewish resident of Palestine is murdered on a beach by two men. His widow, the only eyewitness, changes her testimony several times within hours, variously claiming that the assailants were Arabs, not Jews, and vice versa. Either answer would have been plausible politically, for her late husband was a marked man, hated on all sides.

His crime? Having negotiated with Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister in the newly installed Nazi government, a plan by which German Jews might emigrate to Palestine while retaining a modicum of their assets, contrary to the policy in force of stripping everything they have.

Despite the publisher’s statement that The Red Balcony has historical basis, I find the story of such negotiations dubious. But whether they took place doesn’t matter. If they did, some Jews in Palestine would have strenuously objected to dealing with the Nazis, whereas Arabs would have opposed further Jewish immigration. Those circumstances provide a motive for murder.

British troops disperse Arab rioters, October 1933, American Colony (Jerusalem), Photo Department, location unclear (courtesy Library of Congress; public domain)

Into this maelstrom drops Ivor Castle, a British Jew who has come to Palestine against his better judgment. Trained in law, Ivor has a solid sense of right and wrong, which his new surroundings test to the utmost. He’s assigned to help the well-known Phineas Baron defend two Russian-Jewish immigrants accused of the murder. That means Ivor does the legwork, while Phineas hobnobs with British colonial officials.

A key witness for the defense promises to be Tsiona Kerem, an artist who frequents a café where the accused claim they were drinking at the time of the murder. If Ivor can get Tsiona to corroborate their testimony, they’ll go free. But she flatly refuses to tell him anything.

Instead, she sleeps with him multiple times, tantalizing him but declaring plainly that he’ll never get what he wants from her, which could refer to love, not just the statement that would free his clients. Already in love, or thinking he is, Ivor dares not press her, because whenever he does, she withdraws, which pains him greatly.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Ivor’s not her only lover. It doesn’t help that Palestine seems like a corrupt, lawless place to him, despite its allure and magnificence—and, by the way, that the defendants are probably guilty.

There’s little mystery involved here, then, but that doesn’t matter. The Red Balcony often reads like a thriller, and even though worlds aren’t at stake, the pages turn rapidly, as reversals come thick and fast. I like the wry humor, as Ivor repeatedly gets himself in hot water, a Jewish innocent abroad who can’t figure out his identity, even in the one place in the world where he might feel whole.

The political differences among his coreligionists baffle him too, and well they might. The groups they represent seem like precursors of those that would barely tolerate each other during the fight for independence in 1947-48.

By contrast, Baron, also Jewish, doesn’t even bother to try to figure out who he is, instead playing different roles, depending on whom he’s with. To Ivor, he avows his resentment of the anti-Semitism endemic to their native land; among colonial officials, he’s English to the teeth. In all this, the narrative feels pitch-perfect.

However, Ivor’s bumbling and refusal to speak up for himself wear thin after a while. The Yiddish word nebbish fits him perfectly; he’s practically spineless, helpless in the face of demands of just about any kind. I got tired of how he hides his feelings whenever anyone asks, then apologizes for having failed to provide what was wanted. As a matter of storytelling, though, the trouble he gets into drives the novel.

I wish the narrative tone didn’t resort to archness as often as it does; too much of that feels like a pose. And though I like the writing, Wilson sometimes favors obscure words when a plain one will do, including at least three I couldn’t find in my dictionary.

Still, The Red Balcony gives a marvelously evocative picture of Palestine during the British Mandate:

Almost all Ivor’s impressions of Tel Aviv had been of an unregulated place, free from its moorings. It wasn’t only the flowing eclecticism of its architecture—the houses frequently had no numbers, women smoked in public and wore bathing suits on the bus. In England he had been closed-in by taboo, a suffocating mix of British reserve and Anglo-Jewish restraint. Here he was free, the muddle of his identity of a piece with the town itself.

Wilson also has the colonials down pat. They wear the wrong clothes and eat the wrong food for the climate, symbolic of their inability to understand that they don’t belong there—yet smug in their superiority.

I’ve read several novels about Palestine during or before the war for independence, but this one’s evocative in its own way and, unusually, focuses on religious identity—of a man who’s not religious. That’s original.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review, where this commentary appeared in shorter, different form.

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Uncategorized

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1945, anti-Semitism, book review, British Mandate, Haganah, historical fiction, Irgun, Israel, Jews, literary fiction, love, moral complexities, Palestine, romance, Stewart O'Nan, terrorism, thriller, violence

Review: City of Secrets, by Stewart O’Nan
Viking, 2016. 194 pp. $22

Brand, a Latvian survivor of the Holocaust, drives a taxi in Jerusalem in 1945. But that simple statement skips over many complexities. The British are clinging to their mandate over Palestine, refusing entry to dispossessed Jews like Brand and combing the population for illegal immigrants, whom they deport. Consequently, he must live underground, so his papers, taxi, and apartment come courtesy of a revolutionary cell committed to Israeli independence, which knows him only as Jossi. Since even the possession of a weapon is a hanging offense, ferrying his comrades to clandestine rendezvous or military operations puts him in great danger.

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, Brand becomes more than a chauffeur, about which he has mixed feelings–repugnance at violence, excitement at wielding power, pride in helping create a Jewish homeland. But as his role widens, he realizes that his cell, which he thought belonged to the Haganah, a comparatively moderate organization, has been taken over by the more violent, provocative Irgun. What holds him together is his love for Eva, a fellow Latvian and cell member, who arouses his jealousy by working as a prostitute to gain information.

From this tense, conflict-ridden premise comes a thriller of remarkable depth and breadth, especially considering how spare it is. The jacket quotes a blurb by Alan Furst, and O’Nan deserves the compliment in more than one way. Not only has he shown the same elegant economy as the best of Furst’s more recent World War II thrillers, he’s pushed the envelope. Rather than have Brand be an expert, O’Nan makes him an amateur who can’t master his risky impulses to retain human connection when the smart money says to shut up and pretend you see nothing. But how could he remain silent, when his wife, parents, grandparents, and sister were all murdered, and when he watched a friend stomped to death in a concentration camp? Brand’s confusion and ambivalence, rather than sangfroid or professional devotion, are what drive the narrative.

As with Furst, City of Secrets tastes of atmosphere:

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. . . . The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm.

When Brand goes into action, there’s tension aplenty. But the author also captures tension of a different kind, the everyday variety. Brand must wait for information, which usually comes unexpectedly and never fully enough to satisfy his curiosity. Every drive through Jerusalem means passing British roadblocks, where there’s always a chance he’ll be discovered as an illegal immigrant, or that soldiers will search his car and find what he’s not supposed to have. He craves Eva’s company, but also her love, which she denies him, and which he’s learned never to discuss. Accordingly, every move Brand makes, even if it’s to stay in his apartment, alone, ratchets up the stakes.

City of Secrets manages to suggest much about politics and hatreds without having to narrate them, an admirable part of the economy I mentioned. O’Nan conveys the bitter divisions between the Haganah and the Irgun; the British occupiers’ anti-Semitism; and the moral challenges inherent to fighting for a righteous cause. I like City of Secrets much better than a novel I reviewed on a similar subject, I Lived in Modern Times, or, for that matter, O’Nan’s West of Sunset, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. That was a nice novel; City of Secrets is terrific.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Nobody Escapes: I Lived in Modern Times

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1946, anti-Semitism, British Mandate, historical fiction, Holocaust, Irgun, Israel, Jews, Linda Grant, Orange Prize, Palestine, terrorism, twentieth century

Review: I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant
Penguin, 2000. 260 pp. $24

In this disturbing, insightful novel, Linda Grant portrays the Jews who worked to create the state of Israel in 1946-47 as anything but heroes. They’re gangsters and lowlifes who somehow managed to survive the Holocaust; longtime German and Austrian residents who look down on their Eastern European brethren; arrogant revolutionaries; terrorists; and displaced people who think the world owes them a favor.

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mind you, the British trying to enforce their mandate over Palestine are vicious anti-Semites, and worse. They believe that they had it tough during the world war, can’t decide whom they despise more, Arab or Jew, and express choleric amazement that their inferiors could dare rebel against them, the world’s most practiced colonialists. The only participants in this novel who get a free pass–or almost do–are the Arabs, aside from a rare bombing or sniping, referred to but never shown.

No doubt, the mainstream, heroic narrative about the founding of Israel (or anywhere else) needs correction. Nevertheless, this novel goes too far the other way, so much so that it offends me, though I share some of the author’s political views. Like her, I’m ashamed that my Israeli coreligionists oppress Palestinians today (of which I’ve seen glimpses, first-hand). Yet I reject her blanket portrayal of Israel’s founders as either misguided hoodlums or blind idealists, or of Jews as fractious and arrogant, or that any nation born in war is doomed to fight perpetually. War has always made nations, whether we’re talking about the United States, Serbia, or the Netherlands. How and when those nations make war afterward is another story, but in I Lived in Modern Times, Israel’s path seems predetermined and entirely of Jewish making, which is more than a little neat.

That said, Grant has written a provocative, illuminating story about identity. Her heroine, Evelyn Sert, is a young woman born in England of Eastern European Jewish parents. Through her British passport, she takes ship for Palestine in 1946, pretending to be Christian so as to evade the rules against Jewish immigration. She’s heard of the wonderful experiment that will build a new nation according to modern principles, in which a Jew may find a life without fear and ideals to live by.

But reality doesn’t measure up. First, she tries a kibbutz, whose socialist roots and practices (including free love) appeal to her, only to find that the heat and the hard labor wear her down, and the men treat her like a slab of meat. She settles in Tel Aviv, resuming her former occupation as a hairdresser, but her best customers are British women whose husbands are the police, one of whom believes she recognizes Evelyn from the boat.

So Evelyn splits herself. She dyes her hair blond, calls herself Priscilla Jones, and goes to the beach with these women and their husbands, listening to their diatribes. Her Jewish boyfriend, a mysterious chap who speaks fluent Hebrew, gives her the passion she’s always wanted but insists that she know her place as a woman. This poses a struggle for Evelyn, who has other ambitions and is more literate, smarter, and deeper than he is. Yet Johnny, the name she knows him by, also protects her, giving her a false passport that keeps her safe from the police as Priscilla Jones–for a while. It’s his other underground activities she’s nervous about.

As her openly Jewish self, however, the German and Austrian emigrés, though they open up a cultural world she’s missed since leaving England, also condescend to her as an ignorant bumpkin from Eastern Europe. That wears on her, but even worse, Evelyn tires of what she calls “the so-what people.”


So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where I have been. I know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother? My mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend? My boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers.

Like the contortions of self that Evelyn submits to as an immigrant to a bewildering, divided land, these passages about the social pecking order based on birth or suffering hit the mark. However, after a while, you begin to wonder why Evelyn is so passive, why she doesn’t stand up to her lecturers or simply walk away. It’s particularly jarring toward the end, when she allows someone to bully her into an action I don’t believe she’d ever take. Unlike the case in some historical novels, which rewrite history to achieve the desired result, I Lived in Modern Times takes the opposite route, putting the heroine in a false position to evade an inconvenient historical event. It doesn’t work.

As with its protagonist, this novel’s contortions come to a peculiar end.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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