Isaac’s Beacon: A Novel
A young Jewish woman leaves her family in Vienna in 1940 to travel to Palestine. Upon release from Buchenwald in 1945, a middle-aged Jewish man befriends and encourages a New York City reporter to write about him and other Jews moving to Palestine’s cities and outlying settlements. The three recount, through their own experiences, the violent conception and birth of the nation of Israel.
Robbins is the author of five previous novels set during WWII, including the New York Times bestseller War of the Rats (1999), about sniper fire during the battle of Stalingrad.
Isaac’s Beacon, named after a pioneering Jewish settlement in the Etzion Bloc south of Bethlehem, takes the form of a sweeping epic involving British forces and governance, Arab fighters, and Jewish insurgent groups. Fast-paced, the narrative carries readers quickly across locales and time periods. Missing is context. Except for a notation in a glossary at the beginning of the book, there is no explanation of the Mandate of Palestine that gave Britain the authority to oversee Palestinian and Transjordan territories; hence the confusion for this reader regarding initial British hostilities and later Jewish counteroffensives. Nor is there clear discrimination among Jewish groups such as Haganah, Palamachniks, and Irgun.
While the journey for the reporter ends in his understanding of the land and both its Jewish and Arab inhabitants, unfortunately the same did not happen for this reader.
