“In a foreign land” about Israel’s torn society
Published: Thursday, Apr 25th 2024, 07:20
Retour au fil d'actualité
"In a Foreign Land" is Alfred Bodenheimer's second Jerusalem thriller about police psychologist Kinny Glass. In it, the author takes his readers into Israel's torn society. But the book has a catch: topicality has overtaken literature.
Uriah Zunder lies dead at the foot of a cliff in Cyprus. He was head of the riot police in Jerusalem and was soon to be promoted to district commander. Before leaving for Cyprus, he had been in the office of police psychologist Kinny Glass.
She is also the one who finds inconsistencies in the official version of the circumstances of the death - it is said to have been suicide. Glass carries out his own investigations. So far, the thriller is quite conventional.
The story is interesting for another reason. This Uriah Zunder has increasingly developed into a sharp dog, urging his subordinates to shoot at people as a preventive measure, even if they might be terrorists.
The reader is instantly in the middle of a society whose "ministers declare that Arab villages should be wiped out", according to Glass. Right in the middle of a society that has succumbed to "mass psychosis". One half is demonstrating for freedom, the other is backing the hardline government. And both camps are irreconcilably opposed to each other. "How long would the pressure in the cauldron continue to rise before it exploded?" asks the narrative voice in the book.
The author Alfred Bodenheimer, full-time professor of Jewish literary and religious history at the University of Basel, commutes between Switzerland and Israel, where his family lives. With his crime novels, the earlier ones about the Jewish community in Zurich as well as the most recent ones from Jerusalem, he succeeds in conveying Jewish life and thinking to his readers. In "In einem fremden Land", local readers get to know people in Israel whose thoughts and lives are usually not covered in media reports about Israel.
Bodenheimer wrote his latest Jerusalem thriller in July and August 2023, at a time when large sections of the population took to the streets in protest, not least because of the Netanyahu government's judicial reform. Just a few weeks later, on October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked, murdered and kidnapped Israeli citizens. This was followed by the Gaza War and direct open confrontation between Iran and Israel. Although it is only three quarters of a year since Bodenheimer wrote his novel, its topicality has overtaken it. The story is historical.
©Keystone/SDA
French 
English 
German 
Spanish 
Arabic