In 'The Red Balcony,' Jonathan Wilson weaves noir out of a time in Israel's prehistory when ideologies and cultures clashed — just as they do today.
An Israel-born critic was wary of Rebecca Sacks’ kaleidoscopic debut, ‘City of a Thousand Gates.’ Why she wound up loving it.Wilson sets “The Red Balcony” in motion when Ivor Castle — an Oxford-educated Jewish Englishman whose father changed their name from the German and Jewish-sounding Schloss — comes to Palestine to help with the legal defense of the accused assassins, two right-wing Russian Jews described as looking like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
But the case isn’t straightforward. Initially, Arlosoroff’s wife is certain her husband was shot “by Arabs,” but then she changed her testimony, claiming that Jews “executed” her husband and identifying the accused. Soon after, a couple of already-imprisoned Arabs confess to the murder, but then they retract. The truth is quickly buried under politics, and everyone seems to know more than they let on.
, the militant leader of the Revisionist movement that planted the ideological seeds of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. Unlike more moderate early Zionist leaders, the Revisionists were “territorial maximalists” whose idea of a Jewish homeland is’s Labor socialists, as well as liberal “cultural Zionists” like Tsiona, as they are uninterested in forming a Jewish state, being “happy to live in peace with the Arabs on the ancestral lands in some weak-kneed binational entity.
“The Red Balcony” is delightful for bringing the undeniable mystical tinge of that beautiful landscape to life. And though of course the Holy Land is now much more developed than ever, in some ways things haven’t changed since the 1930s. After getting caught in what would later be known as the Jaffa Massacre, Ivor comes to feel that Palestine “was a place of violence and blood — or at least, a place of multiple clashing dreams of belonging — and that things could only get worse.
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