Ha’aretz, Israel
July 8 2005
Truth to tell
By Fania Oz-Salzberger
“A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal and
Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine” by Hillel Halkin, Public
Affairs, 388 pages.
At the very end of the book, when he discovers that Moshe Shatzman
had burned all of Yanco Epstein’s diaries long ago, the
author-historian-detective grabs his head in despair. Would he ever
know who murdered Perl Appelbaum – if it was murder?
“A Strange Death” is a docu-drama/murder mystery written in the first
person about an American writer and intellectual who settles with his
wife in the Israeli town of Zichron Yaakov in the early 1970s, long
before it becomes fashionable on the real-estate market. The couple
decides to build their home in Zichron on a whim, after an impromptu
visit. But perhaps it is not a matter of chance. Living there, the
narrator develops a deep fascination, almost an obsession, with the
unwritten history of the town, cocking an attentive ear to the tales
of the last of Zichron’s old-timers and its finest storytellers.
After many years of unearthing scraps of information, the author is
contemptuous of Zichron for turning its back on its real, albeit
scandal-ridden, past. “Looted, burned, smashed. The past stood no
chance,” he writes. “A town of tree murderers,” he calls Zichron,
which has eagerly gone about destroying its own beauty.
As the narrator discovers that the diaries have been torched, a
bulldozer rumbles outside the house, leveling yet another tract of
land. Another red-roofed villa (like mine) is going up in one of
Zichron’s new “neighborhoods with a view,” burying under its
foundations terrible personal secrets that exist only in fading
memories, fated to die out with the last of the old-timers. These are
secrets that you will never find out from Zichron Yaakov’s lovely
visitors’ center, the official, “educational” guardian of the memory
of the pioneers and the Baron Rothschild, the Aaronsohns, Hillel
Yoffe and the Langes.
“They’re peasants,” the narrator and his wife are warned by another
resident of Zichron, a South African Jew who surveys the town from
his terrace, over a glass of chilled white wine. “Stubborn, greedy,
pigheaded Jewish peasants. And the stories they tell! Beats the
`Arabian Nights.'”
Yanco Epstein’s stories are indeed straight out of “Arabian Nights,”
including his tales of women, especially the Arab ones, who climb
into his bed at night. Go believe a man who tells you that beautiful
Alya was murdered by her brother on the groundless suspicion that she
had lost her virginity, whereas this same Alya is alive and well,
living in the Nur Shams refugee camp with her children and
grandchildren, and quite willing to share her own account of who
murdered whom. On the other hand, this Yanco fellow knew detective
David Tidhar personally, and he is the only one who knows the story
of how the pre-state militia known as Lehi bumped off the legendary
intelligence officer Davidesco in his own shower.
Hillel Halkin, or maybe only Halkin the narrator, gets even the most
close-lipped Zichron elders to talk. He listens to what they have to
say with a selective ear, and detects a web of mysterious secrets
lurking below the surface. He sneaks into homes and storerooms. He
prowls around the deserted Graf Hotel and the ruins of Carmel Court.
He takes home books, papers and found objects. He questions Rivka
Aaronsohn and plays the detective at the home of her brother Zvi.
With the tacit encouragement of Niederman, a retired school
principal, he goes into the decaying living room of Michael and Nita
Lange and pries off the carved oak frame of the fireplace, imported
from Damascus. Something of the peasant begins to cling to this
American writer, the more the old pioneering colony sucks him in.
Patchwork quilt
Halkin’s book poses a surprising challenge to the “official history”
of the Nili spy ring, the First Aliyah (wave of immigration to
Palestine from 1882-1903) and the early years of the pro-British
underground by a man who is not a post-Zionist, and certainly not an
anti-Zionist, but rather a very focused and brilliant
writer-historian. Halkin invents a new genre as he goes along. This
is neither a historical novel backed up by documented source material
like Shulamit Lapid’s “Gei oni,” nor a historiographical thriller
like Simon Schama’s “Dead Certainties.”
“I wanted to keep the tension between telling the truth and telling
the story,” Halkin explains on the publishing company’s Web site. His
book derives great power from the numerous monologues, some of them
quite wonderful, that he puts in the mouths of his characters –
residents of Hameyasdim Street and Hanadiv Street, of Hadera,
Binyamina, Haifa and Nur Shams. A patchwork quilt of evidence is
built up slowly, with infinite care, along with the mosaic of
characters.
As the copy of the book sent to me as a reviewer (the book came out
this month) did not include the author’s acknowledgments, I do not
have a full picture of the source material used, apart from the names
cited in the body of the text. Despite my professional curiosity, I
feel no burning need to check Halkin’s facts against the “official”
historiography or the “educational” texts on Nili, which Halkin has
clearly read. Halkin’s book stands on its own. Telling the truth, not
so much in the legal as in the literary sense, serves him well.
The history of Zichron Yaakov we all know is old and stale, and built
on boring, alienating rhetoric. Halkin infuses all this conventional
material, from the Baron to the Lehi, with new character and
sensitivity. Edmond de Rothschild strides toward the council
building, surrounded by groveling peasants, like Caesar heading for
the Forum. Sarah Aaronsohn, returning to Palestine after a failed
marriage in Constantinople, was a witness to the Turkish massacre of
the Armenians. Halkin does a wonderful job of reading between the
lines – the laconic tombstone inscriptions; the guest book of the
Graf Hotel in its heyday; a conversation in basic Arabic,
surprisingly gentle in tone, between an old farmer from Zichron and a
Palestinian peasant woman living in a refugee camp.
This book is bound to kick up a storm, if not now then certainly when
it is translated into Hebrew. Dozens of Zichronites, nearly all of
them dead by now, are quoted or mentioned by name, from Arisohn to
Tishbi. Their descendants take up half the Zichron Yaakov phonebook.
The stories are wildly sensational. Alexander Aaronsohn, a writer and
journalist, author of a biography of Sarah Aaronsohn, swindled his
colleagues in the Bnei Binyamin society, transferring a large plot of
land designated for settlement to one of his former girlfriends. He
was an active pedophile. Zichron Yaakov knew and said nothing. He
took his friend Itamar Ben Avi on a sadomasochist night tour of New
York, and by morning, their friendship was over. When he married a
rich elderly philanthropist, everyone in Zichron assumed it was just
an ordinary gigolo affair – sex for money. Halkin investigated and
discovered that there may have been more to it than that.
Detached, yet involved
Only in the most extreme cases does Halkin withhold the name of the
persons involved: Who was the woman who gave herself to a Turkish
officer on the bench in the park one night, but would not sleep with
his men? Who conceived an illegitimate son in Tantura and may have
great-grandchildren frolicking in Fureidis today? Halkin isn’t
talking.
The murder mystery revolves around Perl Appelbaum, one of the four
women who publicly mocked the Nili operatives when they were arrested
by the Turks and marched down Hameyasdim Street. As if cursed, all
four came to a bad end. But Perl, who was found dying on the porch of
her house, did not just die a “strange death.” She appears to have
been poisoned. The identity of the murderer is hinted at as the book
comes to an end.
But these choice bits of gossip, woven into the text with the rare
skill of a storyteller who also knows how to listen, are not the
essence. Because no matter how dubious the facts, the book speaks the
truth and documents the truth.
Never have I read such an Israeli story written so effectively in
English. Any fears I may have had of Anglo-Saxon pompousness or
post-colonial condescension toward the “country bumpkin” settlers of
Zamarin-Zichron vanished after the first few pages. Halkin is not a
visiting anthropologist like Bruno Bettelheim at Kibbutz Ramat
Yochanan. He is not a writer-in-residence at Jerusalem’s Mishkenot
Sha’ananim. In his own way, he is detached, yet involved over his
head. He is the most intimate of outsiders. A vivid reminder that a
writer – any writer – is ultimately a fifth column.
Writing in English, Halkin manages to convey the Hebrew of the First
Aliyah, the speech of the pioneers, their body language and facial
expressions, their gestures. Intimate conversations in spoken Arabic
are successfully conveyed, down to the last nuance. It was a time
when the watchmen of Zichron and the mukhtars of Tantura and
Sindiani, Igzim and Ein-Ghazzal, knew each other well. Whether they
knew and respected one another, or knew and feared one another, is
not the point. And all this, miraculously enough, translates. It even
translates well. For while Halkin the Zionist publicist has the sense
to stay out of this story, Halkin the gifted translator peers out
from every page.
Until now I thought, with a typically Israeli mix of arrogance and
sorrow, that after Meir Shalev’s generation, no one would ever be
able to write that kind of Israeli Hebrew again. I was wrong. Halkin
hails from the heartland of American Jewish literature, which has
known for generations how to transform the Galicianer Yiddish spoken
in Brooklyn into fluent, contemporary English. So why not the Hebrew
of the pioneer colonies? It’s even a relief to know that modern
Hebrew doesn’t have to bear the burden of memory all alone.
Halkin, incidentally, takes a different approach. Just two months
ago, he wrote a short, provocative article called “A Culture Loses
its Flavor,” in which he warns American Jews against consuming Hebrew
texts, ancient and modern, solely in translation. Jewish culture in
translation is culture that loses its flavor, he argues. The great
success of Hebrew-to-English translators in our day threatens the
relationship of Anglophiles with Hebrew itself.
This book will pose a solid challenge to the person who translates it
into Hebrew. I eagerly await the Hebrew version and its critical
reception. It should be interesting to see if any dialogue develops
between Halkin’s book and the novel now being written by Gabriela
Avigur-Rotem, reportedly set in Zichron Yaakov.
Zichron, by the way, has grown tremendously since Hillel Halkin began
to ply the streets between the winery and Cafe Pomerantz,
buttonholing everyone he met. I have been living here for eight years
(not to mention the fact that my great-great grandfather on my
mother’s side is buried here) and I have never met him. Clearly,
though, he is right. Nowadays, the people you meet on Hameyasdim
Street are tourists-for-a-day and folks like me who have moved here
for the housing opportunities and know nothing. The Lange estate has
been turned into a venue for publicity, marketing and media events.
Halkin did a good deed by taking home that fireplace carving from
Damascus (real or imagined).
But there is something I would like to say in defense of this foxy
old town, which all of a sudden has such a marvelous chronicler
sizing it up: It is true that with their miserly farmer mentality and
basic suspiciousness, the older generation of Zichronites sinned
against their own history. They cut down the most beautiful trees;
they rezoned agricultural land for building as if there were no today
and no tomorrow; they burned documents worth their weight in gold;
they took their darkest secrets with them to the grave. But that was
Zichron Yaakov’s decision. With its old-codger temperament and
dilapidated charm, it somehow attracted Hillel and Marsha Halkin, and
got them to build their home there. If not for that, this remarkable
book would never have been written. These old towns, Mr. Halkin,
sometimes have a will of their own.
Prof. Oz-Salzberger is author of “Israelis in Berlin” (Hebrew,
Keter), and a senior lecturer in the School of History and the
Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa.