Murderers

Murderers is a taut, wide-ranging novel that brings together the literary world and the legal system, and reveals the face of contemporary Israeli society. It revolves around a number of families among whom are the Levins and the Robinsons. Shraga Levin, a forgotten poet and former ultra-Orthodox Jew, has shut himself up in his Jerusalem home; his wife Leah is a prestigious lawyer, while their son Lori, a penniless poet, lives off his mother. The Robinson family has a quite different background. Malkiel, an officer in the Israeli army, suffered a major breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. His wife, Varda, fled to Australia; one son, Gadi, fell in the Lebanon War, and the other, Shaul, is a pitiful, failed literary critic.

The events in the book take place during a seemingly ordinary day, part-way between the death of poet David Avidan and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The day begins with Leah Levin’s death in a road accident, but its main thrust is a literary crime. Lori Levin has always resented his father Shraga’s poetic talent. In fact, he has taken poems from Shraga’s major collection, The City, and included them in his own new book. In order to cover his tracks, Lori has already bought up all the copies of his father’s book that he can find and thrown them into the sea. Now, by playing on literary critic Shaul Robinson’s weakness – his passion for books – Lori persuades him to break into his father’s home in Jerusalem. Among the books he wants Shaul to steal is the one that he must still destroy – the last existing copy of The City.

Murderers is filled with fascinating ideas, and each of its characters provides us with different insights into the literary in-fighting as well as legal rivalries in Israel’s close-knit society. Cleverly pulling together the many lives that it follows in their aspirations and despair, this novel portrays the corruption and internal collapse of both literary and legal worlds.