By Rich Cohen
Jonathan Cape, £15.99
Rich Cohen clearly likes tough Jews. His first book — actually called Tough Jews — was a study of Jewish gangsters in New York in the early 20th century.
Those tough Jews were followed by more in The Avengers, which recounted the story of three Jewish partisans in Lithuania, one of them his cousin.
Like many Jewish writers, Cohen is fascinated by the tension between the careful studiousness of the People of the Book, their devotion to family and good works, and their shtarker — tough guy — darker side.
Underlying Cohen’s writing, indeed much of contemporary American Jewish literature, is the anguished howl that is too painful to articulate: how could so many proceed, apparently so obediently, to their deaths?
Writing about the tough Jews, the shtarkers who took up weapons, brings alive the other Jewish history, that of the fighters, reaching back to the Maccabees and the Zealots.
Today, the tradition of the Jewish gangster lives on in the likes of Bernard Madoff, the New York financier now serving 150 years in prison for fraud. More generally, the old-style shtarker has evolved under the Mediterranean sun into the modern Israeli soldier, the toughest of all Jews.
Retelling the story of Israel, from the biblical kings of Jerusalem to today’s fanatics who still struggle for control of the holy city at first seems a redundant enterprise, rather like shipping hummus to Tel Aviv. Numerous, and perhaps better qualified authors have preceded Cohen, among them Sir Martin Gilbert and Howard Sachar. Yet Cohen brings an invigorating verve and style to an oft-recounted narrative. He is a natural story-teller, who transports the reader over time and place, with a novelist’s eye for the telling detail. This is no dry historical chronicle but a vivid recounting of a complex past.
We can witness the Zealots, fanatical Jewish fighters in first-century Judea, wrapped in white robes, their knives concealed as they wait on dusty roads for the approach of the Roman legions upon whom they will fall with blood-curdling cries, ready to die joyfully in battle. The squalor of the Venetian ghetto also comes alive, as do the centuries of antisemitism that helped inspire Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s “messiah of that particular moment”, as Cohen puts it. A century ago, Herzl travelled to Constantinople to meet Sultan Abdel Hamid II, who could but did not grant Palestine to the Jews --- though Herzl did get a diamond scarf-pin. Yet ultimately, Herzl, and not the Ottoman sultan, triumphed.
As the book’s title exclaims, the Jewish state is a reality, however embattled and besieged. Thanks in part to his love of the fighting Jew, Cohen is strong on Israel at war, weaving together diaries and contemporary accounts of the triumph of 1967, for which Israel is still paying a heavy price, and the stalemate of 1973, which helped lead to the cold peace with Egypt.
The book concludes with Cohen sitting, overlooking Jerusalem, wondering if this Israel too will endure, or eventually be destroyed by its enemies. Wondering, too, if future generations of Jews will wear, instead of the star of David on a chain, a tiny replica of an F-16 Tomcat fighter plane?
