A Strange Death: Espionage, Betrayal and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine
This book may be non-fiction, but it is far from being your usual history book. It is a murder-mystery set in a small town in Israel. The story is told in the first person, not that the author was involved in the murder, which took place in the 1920s, but because he is the sleuth who unravels the mystery.
The action takes place from the 1970s onwards, when the author moves to Zichron, near Haifa, and begins to dig into its past. Sometimes he digs literally, in the local rubbish dump, but mostly the story is told as a series of conversations with the author’s neighbours. They are a colourful lot and their reminiscences are discursive. The murder is incidental to several of the stories. The author wants to tell us about the older inhabitants in his home village and through them we see how older Israelis view their past and interpret the present.
