Spies and Storytellers in the Wild West of Old Palestine

FORWARD (Founded in 1897 / Published Weekly in New York)
May 27, 2005

By Hillel Halkin and Alan Mintz

In “A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal, and
Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine” (Public Affairs), author and
translator Hillel Halkin tells the story of the famed Nili spy ring,
larger-than-life figures who spied on behalf of the British against the
Ottomans during World War I. The book, which is told from the point of
view of an American Jew who settles with his wife in Zichron in 1970 and
begins to investigate traces of the passions and scandals left behind by
the Nili events, unfolds within two time frames: the past 30 years,
during which Halkin tries to piece together the true story from
survivors and their children, and the tense years of the war when the
fragile Jewish settlement in Palestine was squeezed between the armies
of the great powers. On a visit to New York, Halkin recently spoke about
the writing in the book with Alan Mintz, a professor of Hebrew
literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Alan Mintz: Your book is signed Zichron Ya’akov-Jerusalem-Zichron
Ya’akov, 1974-2004. It’s unusual not only that a book is written over
such a long period of time, but also that the writing alternates between
two locations. Could you please explain?

Hillel Halkin: My wife and I bought land in Zichron in 1970, soon after
moving from New York to Jerusalem, and spent three years building a
house there. We moved into it in 1973, right after the Yom Kippur War,
and in 1977 we rented it out and moved back to Jerusalem. We didn’t
think we’d return to the house – but in 1979, we did.

The initial contract for the book was signed in 1974, and the actual
writing began three years later. There are many reasons why the book
took so long, but perhaps at bottom I was unconsciously waiting for its
main characters, all elderly or middle-aged people when I began writing,
to die. It’s a book, much of it set in the Palestine of the Turkish
period and the British Mandate, about real people, using their real
names, and I never felt quite comfortable about them reading or knowing
what I had written. Whether it’s a coincidence or not, the last of the
book’s major characters to die was a woman who passed away several
months before I wrote the last page.

In your depiction of it, Palestine reminded me of the Wild West and
other stories about frontiers where natives and settlers mixed both
bonds of friendship and competition in some kind of viability. The
pattern of interaction between Arabs and Jews in the years before the
Balfour Declaration seems very distant from what we know now.

It is. It’s possible to think of the early years of Zionist settlement,
the First Aliyah years between 1882 and the outbreak of World War I in
1914, as pointing to a path ultimately not taken in Arab-Jewish
relations in Palestine.

In terms of our thinking about colonialism, your book presents a complex
picture. The Zichronites are colonists in relation to the local Arabs,
but then in fact they were subjects first of the Ottomans and then the
British, and at the same time dependent on the Jewish Baron de
Rothschild in France. How do you understand their conception of
themselves in this world of colonialism?

Zichron was founded as a Jewish colony along with four other
agricultural Zionist settlements, the first of their kind, in 1882, on
land purchased by Rumanian Jews from an absentee Arab landlord who
evicted the local peasants from it. The word “colonist” was not anything
to be ashamed of in the late 19th century. The major nations of Europe
were then colonizing much of the world, and for a Jew from Ploes¸ti or
Focs¸any, who did not enjoy a high status where he came from, it was
flattering to be associated with Europe in this way. The settlers of
Zichron were thus people who, on the one hand, definitely felt
themselves superior to the Arabs among whom they were placed. They
thought of themselves as modern Europeans and bearers of progress. Yet
on the other hand, they were dirt poor in the first years and had no
illusions of grandeur. Their approach to the Arab world was very
pragmatic. The Arabs were for them the people they had to live with and
get to know. Some of the m, like the chief character in my book, Yanko
Epstein, developed a deep love for Arab life.

For a “suspense” story, “A Strange Death” has a peculiar structure. You
dispatch the espionage and romance plots in the early pages of the book,
and only then does the book begin to unfold. What is the real story you
are trying to tell?

The Nili spy ring was the single most dramatic – and traumatic – event
in the history of Zichron. A lot has been written about it, but as I
began reading about it back in the mid-1970s, I came across two
mysteries that were to form the main thread of my book. The first was an
account that I found of what happened when the Nili spies were arrested
by the Turks in 1917. Several of the spies came from the village, and
those arrested in it were brutally interrogated by the Turks on the
spot. In this account it was related that one of the apprehended spies
was taunted and assaulted by four local Jewish women who fell on him
like Furies and cheered the Turkish soldiers as he was being marched
through the streets of the town. The eerie nature of this scene
fascinated me. Yet it also puzzled me because I knew that the Jews of
Palestine during World War I were not pro-Turkish; on the contrary, they
thought of the British army, then at the southern gates of Palestine, as
their s alvation from a corrupt and despotic regime that was bleeding
the country for its war effort. I wanted to find out why these women
acted as they did.

The second mystery had to do with one of the four – who, in this same
account, was said to have died a “strange death” not long after these
events took place. What was so strange about it? The more I asked the
old-timers in town who remembered her – she died in 1921 – the less
strange it seemed to have been, until one day Epstein’s curious reaction
to a question of mine led me to suspect that she had been murdered as an
act of revenge for informing on the Nili to the Turks and that he alone
knew of it. My attempt to find out the truth about this forms the main
“plot” of the book, though it’s one on which other material is hung.

The romantic figure of Yanko Epstein, the mounted night watchman who
protects the village’s fields from Arab thieves and marauders, is your
chief character. Some of the book’s most vivid color comes from your
retelling of the stories he tells you in the course of your
acquaintance. Yet in the end it turns out that many of these stories,
which at first you take at face value, are fabrications.

When I first set out to write “A Strange Death,” I thought of it as a
straightforward investigation: I was going to find out what had “really”
happened and tell the reader. But not only did what “really” happened
prove elusive, I began to see that it didn’t matter that much. The real
story wasn’t about whether a woman had been murdered; it was about my
cat-and-mouse relationship with Epstein, in which it wasn’t always clear
who was the cat and who was the mouse.

What made Epstein so fascinating a figure was that he was both the
greatest single source of information about the town’s past and the
least reliable. He didn’t invent his stories from whole cloth. He stole
them from other people they had happened to and reworked and retold them
with himself as their hero – and his versions were always better because
he was a natural storyteller and they weren’t.

It was only in finishing the last draft of “A Strange Death” that it
struck me that I had been doing the same thing. I, too, was reworking
stories told to me in order to make them better. I was even reworking
Epstein’s re-workings. He and I were both rivals and accomplices.

But I was morally queasy about this aspect of it. I was using people’s
real names and telling their real stories, and yet I was often changing
the words they had spoken to me, moving things around for dramatic
purposes. When I would tell friends about this queasiness, their
response was generally: Then why don’t you just write it as fiction? I
didn’t because, on a simple level, it was important for me to preserve
real identities because I cared very much about the people I was writing
about and wanted to honor them and perpetuate their memories. But beyond
that, the conflict between telling the truth and telling a story turned
out in part to be what the book was about. If I had given up either of
these things, the book would have lost its momentum. The tension between
them was like a coiled spring that both kept holding it back and driving
it forward.

As someone who has, over time, become a true man of Zichron and not
simply a latecomer, how do you view the changes in the town over this
period?

When we first moved to Zichron, it was a still a small farming village
and a very ingrown one; you could only be a true Zichronite if you were
fourth generation. Over the last 15 or 20 years, it’s gradually become a
rather chi-chi commuter town. Today the population is far more
sophisticated. Many of the inhabitants are academics and professionals
who work in Haifa and Tel Aviv, and the town has not only been
physically spruced up and looks much better, it has a more interesting
and varied population. If we were raising our children there now, they
would have friends they didn’t have then. But I miss the old town all
the same. It had a romance for me that’s gone today.