Mystery, Memory, and Truth

Hillel Halkin, author, critic, and well-established translator, carries impressive credentials. For the past thirty years, working from his base in Israel, Halkin has published work regularly in such publications as the New Republic, Commentary, and the New York Sun. Halkin's first book, the controversial Letters to an American Jewish Friend (1997), won the National Jewish Book Award, and in 2002 his Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel earned the Lucy Dawidowicz Prize for excellence in the writing of history. In his newest book, A Strange Death, Halkin combines the talent of an expert novelist with the skills of an experienced investigative journalist to present a work that is both a tale of intrigue and an acute study of the evolution of a small Jewish community across a span of nine decades.

In 1970 Halkin and his wife moved from the United States to Israel and found themselves acquiring property and building a house in the idyllic Mediterranean setting of Zichron Ya'akov, a small community originally established in Ottoman Palestine by a colony of Romanian Jews who had moved there to farm. As a young writer Halkin found his new surroundings stimulating and began to evoke them in his work. And then, with only slight delay, he uncovered an enigma which would haunt him for decades.

In 1971 Halkin discovered that members of the pro-British Nili spy ring, which was headquartered in Zichron, had been betrayed. Two men who belonged to the spy ring were eventually hanged; and the beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, caught and tortured by the Turks, committed suicide rather than reveal what she knew but left behind her a letter asking for vengeance. To complicate the issue, Halkin found evidence that four women from the village had been seen laughing hysterically while their betrayed neighbors were being arrested, and it was also discovered that each of the four women later met an unpleasant end: one went mad, one died unexpectedly, one became an invalid, and the last lived out her life in disgrace. Halkin sensed a mystery, possibly a murder, and set out to investigate. At this point Halkin might well have remembered Clausewitz, who said, "A great part of the information obtained in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is somewhat doubtful." Substituting the word life here for the word war produces virtually the same results, and in A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal, and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine Hillel Halkin presents compelling proof that truth, the whole truth, is elusive.

Undaunted by such considerations and much to the reader's advantage, Halkin pursued the truth. Here he sought revelation in the lay of the land; there he turned up documents, letters, old photographs, and scraps of memory; and everywhere, carefully and diplomatically, he asked questions. Clues surfaced in dilapidated boxes, disused cellars, and crumbling abandoned houses, but the most riveting and forceful evidence invariably emerged from the long dormant recollections of his neighbors, the fascinating villagers of Zichron. And yet, as often seems to happen in a Pinter play, corners never quite seem to square. The problem, as Halkin was quick to realize, is that memory is an imperfect medium and that almost everyone likes to spin a good yarn. The oral tradition, for all its merit, is fraught with complication. One speaker seeks to dissemble on the basis of ancestral loyalty; another remembers only hearsay; yet another—a born raconteur—embellishes his story; while a fourth, for reasons of actual or perceived complicity, refuses to admit even the most salient facts. Nevertheless Halkin remains persistent, but at the same time, he astutely recognizes that the enigma he pursues is so wrapped in mystery that a final truth and a solution to a possible murder might never unfold.

If such a suggestion should risk inhibiting a reader, let me say quickly that it should not. The mystery in Halkin's study never flags: he has organized it so astutely that...