Life ) JN On The Bookshelf Digest Selected news and feature stories from the Detroit Jewish News. wwvv.detroitjewishnews.cominews ) Back In Time Look for Alexis P. Rubin's "This Month in Jewish History" for August. www.detroitjewishrievvs.com Tangled Affairs The politics, intrigue and romance of 1924 Jerusalem meet in the novel `A. Palestine Affair." SANDEE ) What's Eating Harry Kirsbaum? wvvvv.detroitjewishnevvs.conilopinion jewish•com ) Connecting with Jewish Life In her winning essay, Andi Rosenthal shares her journey of converting to Judaism as a way of connecting with the past and looking forward to the future. Read it on www.jewish.corn. ) %low We Dolt' In his weekly column on Jewish.com , Brian Blum shares how those in Israel try to go about their "normal" routines in the face of daily terror and tragedy. in advertisers online www.detroitjewishnews.com/advertisers mrrs DetailsArt.com www.detailsart.com PARTIES Patti's Parties ... www.pattisparties.invitations.com For online advertising, call 248-354-6060 Special to the Jewish News A British serviceman is singing a sentimental song of the moment from London, while British officers, the mufti and several sheiks, Jewish and Arab judges and lawyers and visiting artists socialize in a Jerusalem garden, outside the governor's home. This scene, early in Jonathan Wilson's new novel, A Palestine Affair (Pantheon; $23), is one of the first to clearly signal that the setting is an earlier, very different time. This is 1924, during the period of the British Mandate. The title hints at several tangled affairs at the core of this artfully written novel — affairs of the heart, of politics, of his- tory, roots, of conflicting truths and also murder. Wilson, a British-born professor who heads the English department at Tufts University, sets his tale against a land- scape of great beauty and intrigue with conflicts unfolding between Arab and Jew, but, moreover, between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews living in Palestine at the time, and between those Zionists who favored the use of violence and those who abhorred its use. Soon after they arrive in Jerusalem, the English Jewish artist Mark Bloomberg and his American-born wife Joyce are startled when a man in Arab garb stum- bles into their garden one evening, falls into Mark's arms and then crashes to the ground. On closer look, they realize that the dead man under the kaffiyeh is an Orthodox Jew: He is a Dutch poet turned journalist named Jacob DeGroot, and his murder stuns the community. Robert Kirsch, a British police officer who's Jewish, is assigned to the case by the governor, and the main suspect is a young Arab boy. All of these lives are then knit together in an intricate, closely stitched pattern. Joyce, although a gentile, is the most committed Zionist among them. She had dreamed of Palestine from London and feels a powerful sense of belonging when she arrives, as though Jerusalem was her destiny. Bloomberg is mourning the death of his mother and his closest friends killed in World War I. He won- ders if he is indeed in Jerusalem because of his late friend Jacob, who wrote poems about a Jerusalem he never got to see; perhaps he is "bringing the dead home, taking the ghost on a tour of the mar- ket." Although Bloomberg's initial assign- ment is to do the kinds of paintings he thinks of as propaganda, he becomes captivated by the light. Kirsch, too, was propelled to Palestine by loss: His brother was killed in the war, and his parents' grief was smothering him. But he set off for this posting in the same way he would have gone to India or Australia, not thinking much about Jews. He is surprised that the Judaism that was so irrelevant in his London years is noticed repeatedly in Jerusalem. The ensuing cinematic scenes — tak- ing place over six months — involve romance, violence, clandestine gun deliv- eries, colonial sensibility, riots, lots of serendipitous meetings, much passion, shifting identities and the testing of moral values and ideals. To tell more of the plot would take away from the pleas- ures of reading the novel. In an interview, Wilson, who lived in Israel between 1977 and 1981 and visit- ed many times, admits that the Middle East place "certainly seems to have taken hold of my imagination." His first novel, The Hiding Room, is set in 1940s Palestine and Cairo, and he has pub- fished stories set in contemporary Israel. He explains that he was drawn to this novel's place and period in several ways. Just as he had looked back to Jerusalem in the early 1940s in The Hiding Room, he wanted "to look a little further back" in this novel. "I was drawn to the raw beauty of the place, in particular Jerusalem, its Old City more or less unchanged for hun- dreds of years, but beyond its high walls a rough and tumble development and an assortment of new arrivals, dreamers, charlatans, lovers of ideas and lovers, all suitably displaced — an environment of stones, debris, construction, and wild flowers growing in the crevices," Wilson said. Additionally, the idea gained clarity after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, when there was much talk about the "singularity of his death, how Jews did not politically assassinate Jews. Actually, the history of Jewish Jewishrelations in Palestine was more complicated — dark- er — than most people think." The novel is loosely based on an actual murder that took place in 1924, when a Dutch Jew named Yaakov DeHaan was killed by Jews outside of Sharei Tzedek Hospital. That story is little known out- side of Israel; the culprits were discovered more than 50 years later.