The Cursed Spies

BEHOLD THE FIRE by Michael Blankfort. 397 pages. The New American Library. $5.95.

During World War I, long before the Maccabees of Leon Uris' Exodus, a tiny Jewish spy ring began operating against the Turkish rulers of Palestine. It was an unlikely group: an agronomist, a poet, a mule trader, a part-time fiddler, two frightened young women and a handful of farmers, none of whom had ever spied before. As this unusual and essentially accurate novel shows, it was a bitter and frustrating adventure--for those who lived through it.

Led by Agronomist Judah Singer, the ring hoped to persuade the British to attack Palestine's undermanned garrisons early in the war, thereby saving the Jewish population from Turkish persecution and paving the way for an eventual Jewish state. Its chances of success, figured one member, were about the same as those of "a chicken scratching at the feet of a camel," while failure might cost the lives of all Palestinian Jews. In any event, as the group well knew, "our people will despise us for what we are doing. Jews have a long hatred against spying. We will be without honor in our own country."

The best they could achieve was partial success, and it probably would have come even without them. The trouble lay mainly with the British, who ignored their carefully documented reports on Turkish military dispositions, kept Singer waiting in anterooms for three helpless years. Not until his desperate agents managed to hand over the Turkish army code did the British take them seriously, and by that time the invasion had already been planned. When Palestine finally fell to the British, most of the ring's principal members were dead and the Jewish communities decimated. And as Singer had predicted, the survivors cursed his spy ring for many years.

Even so, the ring was an important milestone. It was the first Jewish resistance movement in modern Palestine. And it "was symptomatic of the unwillingness of many Jews to continue life as a minority group. "I am sick of defending ourselves," proclaims one leading member. "I want to attack. Not as Russian Jewish socialists, or French Jewish republicans or talian Jewish revolutionaries, but as Jewish Jews."

Author Blankfort, who has a daughter and three grandchildren now living in Israel, has poured his heart into Behold the Fire, his eighth novel. His prose at times is hauntingly Biblical. His description of Jewish farmers battling a locust swarm is so vividly and sparely done that the reader can all but feel the crunch of the crawling vermin underfoot. And his protagonists, growing almost against their will to withstand stresses they never imagined, will not be easy to forget.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.