My Review* of Jonathan Wilson's "The Red Balcony"

An Assassination on the Beach

 

In the evening June 16, 1933, Haim Arlosoroff, the political director of the Jewish Agency, was brutally murdered while taking a walk with his wife on the Tel Aviv beach. Arlosoroff had just returned from Germany where he negotiated the Transfer Agreement which enabled 50,000 Jews over the next three years to leave Germany conditioned on them turning over their resources to be used to pay for German exports to Palestine. To this day the mystery of who killed Arlosoroff is unsolved, and it is at the core of Jonathan Wilson’s “The Red Balcony” which takes us to the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Safed, cities I know well.

 

Wilson’s protagonist is Ivor Castle a young Jewish graduate of Oxford University who is hired to assist the lead defense counsel Phineas Baron. Castle’s first job is to secure the witness testimony of Tsiona Kerem, a very Bohemian artist who he instantly falls in lust and then in love with her, some of which is played out on her red balcony. Kerem is far more involved than first we are first let in on.

 

Castle is helping to prepare the defense for the two accused killers, Aaron Stavsky and Ze’ev Rosenblatt, both of whom are associated with Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist grouping.  Jabotinsky’s group opposed the Transfer deal because it meant doing business with the Nazi devils and it worked to undo the boycott of German goods. Both defendants are ultimately acquitted and to this day the crime has yet to be solved with other potential assailants being hard-lined Arabs who opposed Arlosoroff’s peacemaking and the Nazis because of Arsololoff’s alleged affair with Goebbels’ part-Jewish wife.

 

There are two other interesting characters in the book. A Charles Gross, an Oxford contemporary of Castle’s who is very close to Revisionist Zionism. We also have Gross’ cousin, the Baltimore socialite whose father is very much involved in helping to fund the Transfer Agreement.

 

One of the things I really lied about the book is Wilson’s description of the Palestine Mandate in the hiatus between the Arab riots of 1929 and the Great Arab Revolt of 1936. You get a very real sense of what the state in the making was like in the guise of a crime thriller.

*- Amazon has yet to post this review. Amazon just posted at this URL An Assassination on the Beach (amazon.com)