A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal, and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine - Hardcover

Halkin, Hillel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586482718 ISBN 13: 9781586482718

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2005

Synopsis

In 1917, the members of a spy ring who sought to assist the British in driving the Turks from Palestine were betrayed. Two were hanged; one, the iconically beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, shot herself to escape torture and died a lingering death four days later. It was said that four of the women of the town of Zichron were seen laughing hysterically as the arrests of their neighbors were carried out. Each met a strange fate: one died prematurely, the second went mad, the third was an invalid and the fourth lived out her life in disrepute.

When Hillel Halkin read this story of the village that he lived in, it inspired him to begin a journey into the past. His friends and neighbors each offered a different version of the events of 1917, and Halkin discovered that each of them was in some way affected by the legendary fate of the spy ring. So he began to dig: into the stories, the artifacts and debris of the town, in which he found beguiling traces of events that had taken place half a century earlier. Most of all, Halkin listened to the village's storytellers, of whom none is more expansive than Yanko Epstein, who runs the town museum. Yet even Epstein, for all his love of a good yarn, proves to have a jaw like a steel trap when confronted with aspects of the ancient betrayal.

A journey into the place where history and legend overlap, a murder mystery, a lyrical evocation of the doomed attempt to build a Languedoc town on the Eastern Shores of the Mediterranean, a deft investigation into the betrayal of idealism — A Strange Death is all of these.

About this title

About the Author

Hillel Halkin is a writer, translator, and columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Commentary, and the New York Sun. He lives in Zichron Ya'aka.

Reviews

This promises to be about a mystery relating to a pro-British spy ring in WWI Palestine; in the end it delivers both more and less. Halkin, who delightfully explored another historical mystery in Across the Sabbath River, looks at the dramatic early history of Zichron Ya'akov, one of the first Zionist settlements in Palestine. During WWI, Yosef Lishansky and Sarah Aaronsohn, young locals who favored the British over the ruling Ottomans, led the spy ring, called Nili, bringing internecine conflict and Ottoman retribution to the town. Caught by the Turks, Aaronsohn was tortured and committed suicide; Lishansky was hanged. This much is generally known. But Halkin, poking around local ruins and interviewing old-timers after moving to Zichron in the early '70s, pursues two linked mysteries: was Nili betrayed by a Zichron resident, Perl Appelbaum, and was Appelbaum in turn poisoned in revenge? In exploring these questions, Halkin vividly portrays the Nili protagonists, the rough life in early Zichron, ideological divisions among various Zionist groups, the easy relations between settlers and native Arabs, and the buried secrets and passions of an average town. But the tale gets hijacked by one of Halkin's main sources, whose dramatic but digressive—and, it turns out, heavily fabricated—accounts of his own youth in Zichron detract from the narrative's momentum and coherence. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The community of Zichron Ya'akov is located in the southern foothills of the Carmel Mountains near Haifa. Today, this picturesque village is a tourist attraction for both Israelis and foreigners, but in 1917 this Zionist settlement was at the heart of an enduring espionage mystery that still haunts its inhabitants. Halkin is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and has lived in Zichron Ya'akov since 1970. During World War I, the settlement sheltered a spy ring that passed information to the British about Ottoman military capabilities and maneuvers. The ring was uncovered; the Turks executed two members, and a third committed suicide to avoid torture. Who betrayed them and why? What happened to the supposed informants? In probing the mystery, Halkin uses the tools of an expert novelist and a skilled investigative journalist. His narrative moves smoothly back and forth in time, from pre-Mandate Palestine to contemporary Israel. His book is both a tale of intrigue and a sociological survey of the evolution of a small community over nine decades. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1586482718
• ISBN 13: 9781586482718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 388