Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (0)
Double Vision
June 7, 2007
What are the odds that two books about Aaron Aaronsohn would come out at the same time?
Aaron Aaronsohn? you ask. Who’s he? Which answers my first question: clearly, the odds are quite slim.
Unlike most people, I learned about the dramatic World War I spy ring run by Aaronsohn and his sister Sarah in high school, but, then, I went to a Jewish day school where our firebrand of an Israeli teacher, Mrs. Aphek, fed us plenty of distorical drama along with our Hebrew literature.
During the First World War, the Aaronsohns passed information on Turkish forces to the British, hoping a victorious Britain would support a Jewish state (mission accomplished). More tragically, Sarah was captured and tortured by the Turks, and committed suicide. And, politics aside, there is the tantalizing question of whether Sarah Aaronsohn was the mysterious S.A. to whom T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) addressed the amatory dedication in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
So two books are due: Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Ronald Florence (Viking, Aug.), and Aaronsohn’s Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East, by Patricia Goldstone (Harcourt, Sept.). Mrs. Aphek would be pleased.
(And you can take your pick as to whether, as Florence would have it, Aaronsohn helped sow the seeds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or whether, as Goldstone argues, he was the man who might have prevented it.)
Despite Aaronsohn’s contemporary obscurity, the coincidence of books is probably not a fluke, as writers try—misguidedly, I think—to explain the longstanding and complex Middle Eastern conflict by locating its roots in a moment in time, or a captivating personality or two. Another recent example is Amy Dockser Marcus’s Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Viking). The conflict defies such reductionism.
Still, Aaronsohn’s life has the allure of a good story. One of my high school classmates decided to move to Israel, and when I asked his mother what he planned to do there, she replied, trepidatiously, “I think he wants to be a spy.”
Posted by Sarah Gold on June 7, 2007 | Comments (0)
