Author David L. Robbins’ 15 novels tend to place individuals against the backdrop of huge events. His latest, “Isaac’s Beacon” ($30, Wicked Son), however, concerns the forming of modern Israel. The public launch event takes place at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 10, at the West End branch of the Richmond Public Library, 5420 Patterson Ave. Preorders are available through Book People Richmond.
The plight of statelessness is as contemporary as today’s news. Entire populations are undergoing displacement by disasters such as war and civil strife. Robbins weaves these issues into the epic events of 1945-48. This is Herman "Winds of War" Wouk and James "Chesapeake" Michener territory, to which Robbins is no stranger. Despite the subject rife with political overtones, Robbins says that this is an action-adventure and love story that happens to be set during the time of Israel's creation.
The history is processed through the personal experiences of Brooklyn-born German American journalist Vince Haas. He covers the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he meets Hugo Ungar, a Jewish survivor who illegally immigrates to Palestine and joins the Irgun, who are violently resisting British control of Palestine. Éva is urged by her family to leave Vienna, Austria, to escape Nazi occupation. She transforms into Rivkah Gellerman and becomes a founding member of a settlement farm or kibbutz, the name of which gives the story its title. Another figure, Malik, a Bedouin poet, befriends the kibbutzniks, though he foresees the rising winds of conflict as the Jewish immigrants spread across Palestine. That war will crash against Isaac’s Beacon.
Richmond magazine: What made you sit up three years ago and say, ‘Wow, I know now that I have to write historical fiction about the establishment of Israel’?
David L. Robbins: I read [Leon] Uris’ "Exodus." I felt it hadn’t aged well. What motivates a writer, any artist really, is a challenge. Mine became: Can I capture a war that, at least from a Western standpoint, was ethically ambivalent? Can I, through the perspectives of three, four characters, convey the complexities of what happens?
RM: We receive the impression that no disagreement, when strictly a matter of belief, whether of politics or faith, or some combination thereof, is solvable. Even Vince says that nothing is to be learned from violence.
Robbins: This is what I’m portraying — that is, the moral ambiguity of what’s going on. It’s a coin of which both sides are heads. We can make compelling arguments on both sides, and neither blots out the other. Yes, it’s incredibly complex. The Israelis and Palestinian fighting today aren’t fighting over yesterday and tomorrow, they’re fighting over what happened in 1945 to 1948.
RM: And you sum up “Exodus” in about four pages that is Vince’s journalistic account. And later he’s taken to task because the death of the man he writes about was an American. He doesn’t mention the two young Jewish death camp survivors who the British also killed.
Robbins: It’s made clear to Vince that he’s not a Jew. But by the end, in his mind, if suffering is the coin of this realm, then he’s a Jew. He looks at that story of what the British are doing to these people is wrong — which becomes exactly what the Israelis do to the Palestinians.
RM: And then there’s Rivkah.
Robbins: Yes. Rivkah, my fictional kibbutznik, represents the farming culture of Israel, the moshavim and kibbutzim that turned salt into soil, desert into crops, 2,000 years’ worth of sun-bleached and stony earth into orchards and groves. She represents one of the three key components that create Israel, being the agricultural, the diplomatic and the military.
RM: Malik, the Arab, is almost a mythical figure who emerges out of the desert to deliver his counsel.
Robbins: I’m building Malik as my avatar of the only answer I can see.
This present question between the Israelis and Palestinians won’t be determined by military means — because that would’ve been settled by now. It won’t be accomplished by the geopolitical wrangling of the United Nations, and it can’t be solved long as the Palestinians are used as proxies by other countries, the Saudis on one side and Iran on the other.
I can’t think of any time in history when war and conflict was settled by anything other than military realities. Except for one: apartheid. That was reconciliation. And this requires extraordinary leadership, a [Nelson] Mandela and [an F.W.] de Klerk coming together and saying, 'We can go forward only by publicly recognizing all our wrongs.'
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