The Red Balcony

by Jonathan Wilson

Genres: Jewish Fiction; Romance; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Based on actual events, a gripping novel of sex, love, history and justice in the tinderbox of British Mandatory Palestine, by the acclaimed author of A Palestine Affair

"The story of what is arguably Israel’s foundational murder trial—a tale of multiple identities and loyalties." —Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

“Pleases on several levels: as an adventure tale, a star-crossed romance and a detailed period piece.” —The Wall Street Journal 

It’s 1933, and Ivor Castle, Oxford-educated and Jewish, arrives in Palestine to take up a position as assistant to the defense counsel in the trial of the two men accused of murdering Haim Arlosoroff, a leader of the Jewish community in Palestine whose efforts to get Jews out of Hitler’s Germany and into Palestine may have been controversial enough to get him killed.
 
While preparing for the trial, Ivor, an innocent to the politics of the case, falls into bed and deeply in love with Tsiona, a free-spirited artist who happened to sketch the accused men in a Jerusalem café on the night of the murder and may be a key witness. As Ivor learns the hard way about the violence simmering just beneath the surface of British colonial rule, Jonathan Wilson dazzles with his mastery of the sun-drenched landscape and the subtleties of the warring agendas among the Jews, Arabs, and British.
 
And as he travels between the crime scene in Tel Aviv and the mazelike streets of Jerusalem, between the mounting mysteries surrounding this notorious case and clandestine lovemaking in Tsiona’s studio, Ivor must discover where his heart lies: whether he cares more for the law or the truth, whether he is more an Englishman or a Jew, and where and with whom he truly belongs.

Release date: February 21, 2023

Publisher: Schocken

Print pages: 272

Sample

1 Jerusalem

march 1933

Kohler, the receptionist, eyed the large brown paper package stamped, postmarked, and tied up with string that sat on the front desk between his silver bell and a diminished pile of the local German-language newspaper, the Mitteilungsblatt. He shifted it to the side in order to make room for two additional sets of newspapers, popular items for guests on their way in to breakfast even though the news they carried was always a week old. He had no interest in the bland front page of the London Times, but a photograph of a thin-faced figure with his hair swept back and its accompanying headline in the Frankfurter Zeitung briefly caught his attention: Josef Goebbels had been appointed minister of information and propaganda in Hitler’s new government.

He switched on the overhead fan and a wisp of smoke fell from the gears. Early morning light filtered through shade and touched the brown and mahogany furniture in the lobby, spinning dust motes off its armchairs. Kohler opened the blinds, returned to his desk, caught the sleeve of his jacket in his hand, and ran it across the polished wood to accomplish an extra shine. The newly admitted light spilled through the front windows and cut sharp white diagonals onto the wall behind him.

Kohler banged his hand on the bell and the two Arab boys, Ahmed and Ibrahim, who acted as weekday porters, clattered upstairs from the basement and appeared in the lobby. They looked around in vain for guests to assist and luggage to transport.

“Here,” Kohler said, handing over the package, “take it up.” He muttered some instructions to the boys and then they were gone. Easter was a month away; the great rush of pilgrims, mostly German, some British, was yet to arrive. Soon they would swell the congregation in the Church of the Redeemer, crowd the Via Dolorosa, and fill the Hotel Fast to capacity. Kohler, as Ellrich the manager had requested, was doing what he could to ensure that these tourists of the Holy Spirit received a rousing and congenial welcome upon their arrival.

The boys stood behind a balustrade that topped the ornate stone parapet on the second floor. Together they lowered the banner attached to the flagpole, removed the old flag, and replaced it with the new. A stiff breeze blew in from the desert to the south; the sky, shot through now with blue morning light, shimmered over the walls of the Old City. From their vantage point the boys could take in the distant bustle of activity around both the Damascus and Jaffa Gates. They winched the flagpole back into place.

Kohler stepped out of the hotel and crossed the cobblestone street, shooing a mongrel dog from his path. There was the Union Jack, and now hanging alongside it was the new German flag with its striking black swastika snapping in the March wind high above a broad swath of the streets of Jerusalem. Kohler observed it with pride. Perhaps, he thought, it might even be visible from his own home where it sat tucked in among a row of stone houses that his grandfather Stefan, a dutifully committed Templar from Ludwigsburg, had helped to build on the Street of Ghosts.

Two British soldiers in steel helmets, rifles in hand, approached on Kohler’s side of the street. He had an impulse to stop them and point out the new flag, but he held back, and they passed by without looking up.

 

2

june

Arlosoroff came out of the Jewish Agency building on King George Street, slumped into the back of the car, and laid his briefcase on the seat next to him. He was exhausted. He brushed a thin layer of dust from the sleeves of his suit jacket, imagining that the grime of Europe was still on him, staining his shirt cuffs.

After Berlin, after the train south and the nauseating boat trip from Italy to Egypt, he’d had only one day of rest in which to recover his equilibrium. Then, it was back on the train, this time from Cairo to Tel Aviv, and finally, home to the pure joy of embracing Sima and hugging his baby son. He had one warm, fragrant June night in his own bed, the sea lapping into his dreams, and the following morning he was on the last leg of his journey, up to Jerusalem to present the fruits of his labor, the putative terms of the transfer agreement he had negotiated with Hitler’s new government—the economic equations, his own dismal science at its most dismal.

He tried to view the situation in its essence, simplified. What the Nazis wanted: an end to the international boycott of German goods precipitated by their brutal treatment of Jews, which was visible to anyone who walked the streets of German cities—the beatings, arrests, exclusions, disbarments, dismissals. What Jewish Palestine wanted: exit visas for those persecuted German Jews, and if the Nazis wouldn’t let them take their money out, which they wouldn’t, then Arlosoroff wanted, at the very least, a deal to allow fifty thousand Jewish migrants to use their funds to purchase German goods for export to Palestine.

He saw two side effects. One that could only be whispered was the invigoration of the Jewish economy in Palestine with German instruments and equipment in the factories, German machines on the farms. And one that couldn’t be spoken of at all: a boost for the German economy, with all that implied in a country committed to a vast military buildup. It was an ugly, unsavory deal, but how else could the Jews purchase their freedom to leave?

And, of course, the British, rulers and governors of this thin strip of land, they too must be brought on board, appeased and paid, a thousand-pound entry fee for every Jew coming in. Where, he wondered, would that money come from? A detail yet to be worked out.

In Jerusalem he outlined everything to the other members of the agency’s executive committee, plumbed the depths of the moral quandary of dealing with the German government at all, threw darts of clarity through the blue smoke of cheap cigarettes, traced the degree of progress and possibility that he had discussed in Germany. In the end he took a sip of water, looked around the table, noted the concern etched in every face, and offered the soft landing of his conclusion: news of a village in Palestine that would become a major center for transferred German Jewish youth once the agreement was complete. This, he proudly affirmed, had been the positive content of his lunchtime discussion with Sir Douglas Wharton, the British high commissioner.

He briefly closed his eyes, opened them to find the driver staring at him in the mirror. Was it a hostile look? Maybe. An hour and a half and he would be back once more in Tel Aviv. He’d told Sima that he’d meet her at five-fifteen p.m. A walk and then an early Sabbath dinner at the Kaete Dan boardinghouse. The driver turned the key in the ignition, Arlosoroff rolled down one of the rear windows, and before long the car began its serpentine descent out of Jerusalem, past terraces of gnarled olive trees clamoring upward from the sunbaked earth.

He took out a clean white handkerchief, removed his glasses to clean the lenses. In Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm he had walked past overflowing flower stalls, and a woman with bright red cheeks had offered him a huge bunch of fragrant blue violets. When he had shaken his head no, she had proffered instead a bunch of honey-colored daffodils. If Sima had been with him he would have bought it for her. But, of course, she couldn’t be, and a good thing too.

Prague, Warsaw, London, Berlin, meeting after meeting. The untethered urgency of it all. In Germany Hitler’s Brownshirts beat up Jews on the street with impunity, made arrests for no reason, filled detention camps; in the city squares, there were funeral pyres for books, and behind shuttered windows thousands of Jewish lawyers and doctors forced from their professions. Even the kosher slaughterers had been banned—henceforth the only meat available to Jews was cuts that they could not eat. Click of his childhood tongue, the murmur of memory; he’d been happy there once, immersed in his studies, or rather not unhappy, the same way that he’d always felt about German culture—he admired it, but it didn’t touch his heart. No aromatic flowers could hide the stench of what was happening now.

For a while he simply lay back and absorbed the heat while the air thickened and circled him. Stripping off his jacket had made no difference; his powder-blue shirt was stained with sweat.

A British army vehicle labored up the hill on the other side of the road. Arlosoroff followed its path, then opened his briefcase and removed a newspaper. His own angular, bespectacled face was on the front page accompanied by an article. That day he was probably one of the most hated men in Palestine: for fanatical Revisionist Jews, he was the traitorous envoy sent to Europe in order to set up and validate a deal with the devil; for the local Arabs, he was the Jew trying to force wide the gates of admission for an influx of European refugees.

He read the first few lines: “There will be no forgiveness for those who have for greed sold out the honor of their people to madmen and anti-Semites…. The Jewish people have always known how to size up the betrayers of the nation and their followers, and it will know today how to react to this crime.” He cast the paper aside and stared out of the window. Only yesterday, before he had set off for Jerusalem, Shaul had reached out his tiny fingers and played his favorite game, pulling off his father’s ring and then replacing it, only this time he had tried to slide it back on his mother’s finger, and Arlosoroff, his voice rising from some chill winter as if he were a guest from the future, had cried out, “Not yet!”