The phrase 19th-century British Jews tends to bring to mind images of families fleeing pogroms and cramped East End tenements. Less so detectives skipping across Europe to thwart coups and dine with royalty.
But debut novelist Aron Goldin is determined to push back against the stereotype. The hero of his debut novel, Murder in Constantinople, is a young man of action whose Jewishness acts more as a superpower than an impediment.
“I loved the idea of creating an intrepid detective who would go on these adventures, but who was also Jewish and whose Jewish identity was at the forefront because you don’t really see that,” says the 26-year-old Goldin of his protagonist, Ben Canaan, a rebellious working-class boy from Whitechapel who finds himself on the trail of a serial killer in Constantinople after discovering a mysterious letter. “I asked, why can’t a Jew do what Indiana Jones does? Why can’t a Jew do what Sherlock Holmes does?”
A Cambridge graduate, Goldin exudes confidence: at one point he says he has never suffered from writer’s block. Yet his book is indeed something to be proud of. An entertaining yarn set during the Crimean War and involving multiple murders in the then Ottoman capital, it confronts the realities of life for 19th-century British Jewry: we first meet Ben – “a badly behaved version” of Goldin – rebelling against his father’s wish he work for the family business. “I wanted to ask: what would I do in that situation? How would I feel?” said Goldin who is of similar age. “It was incredibly hard for Jews back then: they were facing these unbelievable obstacles, shut out of institutions, tied to certain expectations. I wanted Ben to explode those boundaries and say, ‘No, I’m going to do it my way.’ And without being too preachy, Ben’s actions throughout the novel demonstrate the ability of Jews to forge their own path. In a way, I wanted Ben to be that glimmer of what the future could be.”
In a wholly different way, Goldin’s family history exemplifies something of that future. During the 1850s, his mother’s side of the family came to London from eastern and central Europe, settling in Whitechapel where, like the Canaans, they worked as tailors and milliners. Thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of a good three or four generations, the family were eventually able to move out of the East End. These days the Goldins are more commonly found in medicine, law or the arts. “I look at my family history as a success story,” says Goldin. “I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the people who had their face up against the furnace to create this wonderful life we now enjoy.”
For Goldin, that life includes some startling achievements for someone in his mid-20s: a second book in the series is scheduled for 2026 and three more are mapped out. A former Independent Jewish Day School pupil, he began writing before his bar mitzvah (at Kinloss, with the now Chief Rabbi). His inspirations range from comic books to Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz, but he admires Dickens above all, for keeping his readers hooked.
“His stories were serialised and it was almost like the TV of its day. You needed to have something at the end of the chapter that would make people tune in for the next,” he says. “I really admire that kind of storytelling because it’s layered, it’s substantive, there is real depth. But it never came at the compromise of being engaging and fun.”
His own book is full of vivid detail, seen through the eyes of a bedazzled outsider. But since he embarked on it during Covid, he was unable to visit and had to make do with contemporaneous travel books for his research. “They tell you everything about what it was like in that precise period, down to currency, local customs, what to do if the police accost you, architecture, the history of the place, the topography, sites, markets, the rest of it,” he explains. “It was a sort of a crash course in Constantinople.”
The eagle-eyed might notice that the Crimean War began in 1853, a generation before Jews fled eastern Europe on masse (although a page 4 mention of the JC, in publication since 1841, is not inaccurate). “It’s true, the big wave of eastern European migration is about the 1880s, so I brought it back a little,” he says. “This is the tightrope walk whenever you’re writing historical fiction: I found when I was building this world, I was making judgments quite carefully over whether I was going to say absolutely faithful to historical fact. But the music halls and the features of Jewish life, that was all there. The institutions of Jewish life were there, but the precise balance of Sephardic Jews versus Ashkenazi was different. Constantinople is the definition of a melting pot: it was the meeting point of Europe and Asia, and you had the echoes of war in the background, like the rumblings of a distant earthquake filtering through society at a point when this grand empire was starting to decline.” He wanted to explore the city’s decadent underbelly, and its Jewish community, “which was at the time very powerful and interesting, very different from London”.
Yet Goldin’s chosen geopolitical backdrop – with war raging in Crimea and the Great Powers fighting via proxies – now seems incredibly resonant. There are definitely parallels with today, he says. “In the Crimean War, you have the empire of the East, being Russia, and the empires of the West, Britain and France, Austria, Hungary, Prussia, going toe-to-toe around a geographical, geopolitical fault line. The actors may have changed, but the conflict itself substantially is the same.”
Goldin also works in screenwriting and tells me he has contributed to a number of projects, including a film, although the complex nature of the industry means his work hasn’t come to light yet. His book strikes me as ripe for adaptation, and he agrees, but points out the settings would be costly. As for dream casting, he demurs to name names, although I suspect he has thought about it.
But from next year he’ll be turning his attention to a different sort of life when he starts as a commercial barrister, having previously completed the law conversion course. “The good thing about being a barrister is you are self-employed,” he points out. “There’s a lot of manoeuvrability and I think it will be the Bar at the centre and then the writing around that.”
For now, there’s the second Ben Canaan book to finish, and Yom Tov on the horizon. Having grown up Orthodox, Judaism is still central to his life. “I actually really like this time of year,” he says. “Yom Kippur is probably my favourite event of the Jewish year. I think the fasting just puts me in a contemplative mood.” Who knows, maybe we will see Ben at Kol Nidre in the next book. There have certainly been stranger settings for thrillers over the years.
Murder in Constantinople (Pushkin Press, £16.99) is out now
