a nuclear fable and eight stories
ACTS OF TERROR AND CONTRITION) is both a political novella about Israel and a literary thriller telling the unofficial story of Israeli responses to Saddam Hussein’s missile attacks during the 1990-1 Iraq War – and the possibility that his missiles might carry nuclear warheads “to burn Israel to the ground,” as Tarik Aziz said then. This “nuclear fable” presents the secret history of the Mossad Special Operations Chief’s covert threats to force world governments to face what is at stake should Iraq have launched a nuclear attack. Desperate and unyielding in the face of Saddam’s threat, the Chief, Arie Schneider, puts a renegade plan into place, even as he confronts the machinations of the deeply-divided Israeli government. Shadowing all this is the presence of the first Intifada, an Arab mother, and particularly her Islamist son, who plots his own act of terror. Enmeshed in the nuclear crisis, Arie must yet face his troubled wife, their two children, and above all his father, Rami, a holocaust survivor and retired diplomat. In opposition to the extremity of Arie’s plan, the old man summonses all his wisdom and his wily, struggling will to confront his son (in an echo of the biblical sacrifice of Isaac).
Accompanying the novella are 8 STORIES OF THE EIGHTIES: In “Einstein’s Sorrow,” the first story after the novella, a wry secular Jewish owner of a New York toy company is visited one night in 1980 (the great physicist’s centennial year) by the spirit of the genius, and together the two Jews mourn the development of the nuclear bomb. In “Your Name is Hiroshima,” set in the mid-eighties, a young professor creates a haunted poem in response to the film “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” as he faces the needs of wife, mentor, department chair, during a visit to campus by a famed Russian poet. The third and fourth stories are told by two elderly characters – an Armenian-American in “Taste of the Sun” and, in “Contrapuntal Piece,” the Greek widow of the eminent German-Jewish expatriate pianist from Hungry Generations; each character seeks the clarity to go on in the face of maddening infirmities and the incomprehension of others. In the fifth story “Before the Revolution,” a former political activist takes his family on a European vacation in 1984, and on an Italian train he faces his youthful double, a fiery student anarchist. The final three stories in Terror and Contrition chronicle the life of Joe Mubar, a Syrian-Italian American artist. “Triptych” tells his story over 30 years from his abused childhood, through his youthful wildness, to his struggle to find his balance in marriage. The second story – “Odalisque” – presents Joe, after divorce, in his sexual collision with a woman in the college town where he teaches art. “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” – the third story in the trilogy – portrays a last chance Mubar has to break the cycle of failed communication and to right himself as a father to his teen-aged son in the America of 1989.
