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On The Bookshelf

Remembering Batya Our

In her hands, pulp fiction became great literature.

SAND EE B RAWARS KY

Special to the Jewish News

B

atya Gur, the novelist who
pioneered the genre of Israeli
detective fiction, died late last
month in her home in Jerusalem, after
a nine-month battle with cancer. The
57-year-old writer, known internation-
ally for her literary approach to mur-
der mysteries, has been compared to
authors P.D. James and Ian Rankin.
She was still working in her last days
of life.
"She was operating at the top of
the genre," Maggie Topkis, one of the
owners of the Greenwich Village spe-
cialty bookstore Partners in Crime in
New York City, said. "She was enor-
mously insightful and really expand-
ed beyond the traditional borders of
the genre, like the very best mystery
writers."

Her first book, Saturday Morning
Murder, was set in a psychoanalytic
institute; her first husband was then
training at the Israel Psychoanalytic
Institute, and she knew the workings
of the place and its cultural climate
very well. The book, along with subse-
quent mysteries, quickly became a
bestseller in Israel; her books were also
translated and sold abroad.
In a 1994 interview with this
reporter, while Gur was visiting New
York City as part of a national book
tour, she compared the process of
writing mysteries to doing puzzles.
She said that she began with a setting,
a murder and a motive and only fig-
ured out the plot when she began
writing, working out the knots as she
got more deeply involved. "I get tense
myself," she said.
In Gur's hand, detective fiction
became great literature. She wrote
with psychological depth, creating
multidimensional characters. Most
importantly, her books are a pleasure
to read. Topkis said customers fre-
quently come into her 11-year-old
store asking when the new Batya Gur
book is coming out.
Jerome Chanes, who teaches at
Barnard and Stern College and has
read Gur's novels in Hebrew and
English, noted, "Each of her novels
Doing Puzzles
identifies and explores an area of clas-
Born in Tel Aviv to par- sical Israeli society, whether the kib-
butz, psychoanalysis, Shabbat or a par-
ents who survived the
ticular neighborhood, and uses that as
Holocaust, Gur taught
literature in a Jerusalem a vehicle for murder. It's very deftly
done."
high school, and then
at age 39 the mother
Israeli Gumshoe
of three children shift-
A strong believer in the dictum "write
ed career gears. She
about what you know," Gur would say
had been a voracious
that credibility is the God of the nar-
reader all her life but
rative. While offering powerful mys-
had never written a
teries, her books meticulously explain
book. She chose to
the subtleties and complexities of
write detective fic-
Israeli life, including social and politi-
tion because of the
cal issues.
format's tight and
Readers who know little of the
regular structure,
Jewish state will come to understand,
although it was not
through her books, something about
a form used by
the founding of Israel and the current
Israeli writers.
conflicts; those who are familiar with
Israel will appreciate her textured por-
2004's "Bethlehem
trayal.
Road Murder" was
Gur wrote five mysteries featuring
her last work.
Ohayon, including Murder Duet,

To call her highbrow is to make the
work sound unapproachable or snooty
when she was indeed down to earth.
But her style was smart and distin-
guished. In detective Michael Ohayon,
she created a distinctly Israeli hero,
and she opened up iconic cultural
worlds.
For many of her American fans who
weren't aware she had been battling
cancer for the last 9 months, her death
was a shock. Her last book, Bethlehem
Road Murder (HarperCollins; $24:95),
was published in English at the end of
2004. About that book, a police pro-
cedural, Publishers Weekly said, "This
engrossing psychological study should
appeal to a wider readership, not just
those fascinated with the promises and
paradoxes of the Jewish state."
The opening sentence of Bethlehem
Road Murder may have been a person-
al creed: "There comes a
moment in a person's life
when he fully realizes that
if he does not throw him-
self into action, if he does
not stop being afraid to
gamble, and if he does
not follow the urgings of
his heart that have been
silent for many a year —
he will never do it."

Batya Gur was a strong believer in
"write about what you know.

Literary Murder and Murder on a
Kibbutz
"Ohayon is a better edition of me,"
Gur had said. She described herself as
someone who lived on both the inside
and outside of society, looking in with
a detective's sensibilities.
Perhaps the first Israeli gumshoe in
fiction, the Moroccan-born Ohayon is
tough but sensitive, cultured and
intellectual in his crime-solving
approach. He's also full of patience
and compassion toward the people he
deals with. And, the divorced detective
is introspective, conflicted and com-
plicated.
When Rochelle Krich, a mystery
writer who lives in Los Angeles, first
came across Gur's work, she felt an
immediate kinship with her, as Jewish
women writing mysteries. "What I
like about her mysteries is that they're
very literary, without special effects —
like chase scenes. There's nothing gim-
micky about what she does. Her char-
acters are real and I could relate to
them, even if she didn't share my
political or religious views."
"What I learned from her is that
quiet can still be intense and emotion-
al," said Krich, whose own new mys-
tery, Now You See Me, is due out in
the fall.
Krich added she appreciates the way
Gur used flashbacks to impart details
and invoked fragrances and objects to
elicit memory.
Gur, who was also a literary critic
for Ha'aretz, was an outspoken critic
of Israeli politics and society, frequent-
ly speaking out against government
policies while traveling abroad. She is
survived by her three children and her
husband, Ariel Hirschfeld, a literary
critic. ❑

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