Acclaimed Newton author Jonathan Wilson will discuss — and read from — his new novel, The Red Balcony, at Newtonville Books in Newton Centre on Thursday, March 16 at 7PM.
Set in 1933, in The Red Balcony, Wilson explores the ambiguities in national and international politics and events involving the British Mandate in Palestine (established by the League of Nations in 1920). And he examines the increasing mix of individual and group identities in Palestine at the time. Many of the conflicting political identities are still a part of today’s Israel.
The protagonist, Ivor Castle — a British Jew, and recently qualified Oxford-educated lawyer — travels to Tel Aviv to join a distinguished British barrister in preparing the defense of two staunch Revisionist Zionist defendants on trial for the murder of Haim Arlosoroff, a Socialist Zionist. Although The Red Balcony is fiction, it is based on an actual political murder that took place in Tel Aviv in 1933 and remains unresolved. Haim Arlosoroff, a member of the Zionist political party working with the British Mandate, was negotiating a deal with Nazi Germany to release Jews to Palestine. He was ambushed and shot by two men. Two militant Zionists – who were fighting to establish a sole Jewish homeland in all of Palestine – were arrested and held for trial. At trial, they were represented by high-powered Kings Counsel barristers. In The Red Balcony, they were represented by a fictional Kings Counsel – Phineas Baron, an Englishman – friend of Ivor Castle’s father, a successful London barrister.
Ivor is young, naive, and inexperienced in the complexities of life and relationships, He has had no real involvement or interest in politics. Until this point in his life, he has followed the course set him by his father – a protected life of British upper middle class privilege. Being Jewish in England sets him apart, the object of offhand antisemitic comments. Coming to Palestine, he isn’t entirely sure what to expect, but clearly he is not prepared for the complexities of Palestine, which was more a cauldron than melting pot. And Palestinian social life is more liberated than Ivor’s British – Oxford experience.
Phineas Baron sends his new protege to interview Tsiona Kerem, an artist who may have seen and sketched to the two defendants on the night of the murder and may be a witness for the defense. His journey leads him into a new, intense, and ethically compromising relationship. Born in Palestine, Bohemian, and instantly erotically irresistible to Ivor, Tsiona becomes his obsession. She is both enigmatic and brusquely forthright. In response to his intense passion and, perhaps, his pursuit of her testimony as a defense witness, she tells him, “You will never get what you want from me.” (Merging fiction and fact, when Mr. Wilson taught at Hebrew University, he lived in “Tsiona’s house“ which he said was one of the most beautiful he had ever seen.)
In contrast to Tsiona, Ivor encounters Susannah Green, a Jewish debutante from Baltimore visiting Palestine with her parents, only tangentially connected to Palestine’s feuding politics. Her wealthy father is working with the Nazis to supply money for the Arlosoroff effort to bring German Jews to Palestine. Although Susannah was denied admission to Barnard College because it had filled its “Jewish quota,” she seems undaunted by institutional antisemitism and the narrow strictures of Baltimore’s Jewish society. Resilient and open to the complexities of Palestine, Susannah carves her place.
Linking Susannah and Ivor is her cousin, Charles Gross, now living in Palestine and militating for establishment of a Jewish homeland in all of the British Mandate on both sides of the Jordan River. Charles was a year ahead of Ivor at Oxford and a strident voice for the Jewish state in waiting, during the British Mandatory. In Charles’s opinion Arlosoroff “…cut a deal with the Nazis. It was despicable. I’m glad he’s dead. It wasn’t us, but I wouldn’t have been unhappy if it had been.”
One hot day in Jaffa, Ivor takes refuge in a beautiful Russian Orthodox church, and wonders that Jews don’t convert to Christianity. His father is an atheist, and he is not particularly tied to religious ritual. Yet something holds him and other secular Jews in Palestine, “…but the whole contrary lot of them agreed on one thing: They wanted a place where nobody would bother Jews anymore. And was that why Arlosoroff had been set, because he’d done a deal with the people who were bothering Jews the most?”
The Arlosoroff case, still a mystery ninety years later, serves as a roadmap for Ivor’s self-discovery. In following its many twists and false leads, Ivor discovers a world of contrary ideals and ideas among the disparate “cliques” in Palestine. Jonathan Wilson’s vivid descriptions of Palestine’s beauty, its emerging communities, and its marketplaces add a rich dimension to his novel. At every turn, Ivor confronts some new experience, something dangerous and life-threatening, to challenge and enlarge his sense of self as a Jewish person.
Like Ivor Castle, Jonathan Wilson was born in London and is Jewish. He, too, experienced antisemitism there. At the same time, he and his brothers were not barred from education or careers. In fact, one of his brothers was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire), bestowed by Queen Elizabeth. Mr. Wilson was educated at Essex University and studied at Oxford University. He (and the late Queen) came to New York in 1976 — America’s bicentenary — and was amazed at both the number of Jews and “so many Jews having so much fun.” In 1977, he went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught, completed his doctorate, and met his wife, Sharon Kaitz, an artist.
The Red Balcony is Wilson’s third book set in Palestine during the British Mandate. “We don’t look enough at the Colonial forces — England and France — in the Middle East and their influence,“ he said, explaining that he was interested in the area before territorial issues were resolved. “I grew up in England and was fascinated by identity.” But in Israel he said, he was viewed as English!
The 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin raised new questions of Israel’s identity for Mr. Wilson, noting that the schism among Jews during the British Mandate “became the schism we have seen going forward.” Prime Minister Rabin, who tried to broker peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization through the Oslo accords, was vilified in the Israeli press and assassinated by an ultra-right-wing Jew. Mr. Wilson sees parallel in attitudes toward Prime Minister Rabin and Haim Arlosoroff, and history repeating itself. ”Although he clearly shares neither the Revisionist nor right wing views, he is interested in how “the Revisionists would think doing a deal with the Nazis was doing a deal with the devil,“ he said, “but the deal allowed 50-60,000 Jews to escape Germany and invigorate the economy.”
Mr. Wilson laments what he sees as the assault on democracy in Israel today: “It has been building for a long time. I don’t know if it will be going back from the brink.” His friends in Israel are in despair and protesting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s effort to undermine Israel’s judicial system.
A longtime Newton resident, now retired from Tufts University, where was chair of its English Department as well as Founding Director of the Humanities Center, Mr. Wilson devotes his time to writing. One of the great pleasures of his current literary tour was his appearance in Washington, D.C., where former students from across his Tufts tenure came to hear him.
