City of secrets

Review by New York Times Review

THE DESPERATE GROUP of four men pried loose the tracks, flagged down the train, held the engineer and passengers at gunpoint and blew the mail car to smithereens to crack the safe and make off with the payroll for the troops in town. Not Butch and Sundance, but a raid by an action cell of the Haganah, the Israeli underground resistance operating against British Mandate forces in post-World War II Jerusalem. To Stewart O'Nan's 15 previous, omniform novels we can now add the excellent "City of Secrets," a little jewel, wonderfully sparse, moody and uneasy, reminiscent of the delicious, frayed-collar noir of le Carré's "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold." O'Nan's protagonist, a widower named Brand, is a Latvian Jew whose family was swallowed up by the successive predations of the Soviets and the Nazis in the Baltics. Brand alone survives the camps, and immigrates illegally to Israel. The Haganah gives him alias identity papers and sets him up as a Jerusalem taxi driver by day, perfect cover for him to be a low-level courier, delivering parcels or ferrying bomb-laden saboteurs through the crumbling alleys of midnight Jerusalem. Brand is diffident, but refusing these grim freedom fighters is not an option. Eva is a melancholy widow of faded beauty who regularly visits foreign officials in their rooms at the King David Hotel, sexual honey traps specifically to elicit information for the cell. Brand and Eva spend free days - and nights - together, but she forbids him to fall in love with her. Instead, compliant Brand drives Eva to her appointments and numbly waits outside the hotel to take her home. The Haganah operates in a bitter shadow world, bound by the immutable elements of clandestine operations. Brand knows little about fellow cell members: Their true names and professions are compartmented. Furtive nighttime meetings are held in abandoned schools, hospitals and apartments, individual escape routes memorized, every ear cocked for the growl of British armored cars in the street. Precious firearms wrapped in oilcloth are cached in cemeteries and backyards. For Brand, this campaign is at once desperate, homespun, sometimes petty and, invariably, biblically murderous. Brand becomes increasingly involved, coping with the Damoclean dread that comes with operating in a quarantined area against agitated occupiers. He lives with the nightmare of turning a corner and driving into the searchlights of a midnight roadblock, his taxi with a bloody rear seat and a Sten gun in the trunk. He must ignore the possibility of being gut-shot during a symbolic raid against a suburban electrical substation whose demolition plunges only fellow Jews into the dark. And he swallows the panic he feels when a cell member is arrested, interrogated and then, worst of all, released. The man swears to Brand he has not given up the cell, but mere contact with this irredeemable compatriot is contaminating. The dutiful Brand himself comes under suspicion and is interviewed by the resistance, and his loyalty is tested by what professionals call a canary trap - mentioning a confidential tidbit to see if it surfaces later. Ominously, even Eva draws away from Brand, to protect him because, she finally and predictably admits, she loves him. But for Brand it is too late. The cost of doing nothing, of giving up moral choices, of being used by a movement not his own, is too great. You can smell the squally desert wind that bends the cypress trees on the Jerusalem hills but never brings the rain. "City of Secrets" makes for great summer reading. A postwar campaign at once desperate, homespun, petty and biblically murderous. JASON MATTHEWS, is a retired C.I.A. officer and the author of two espionage novels, "Red Sparrow" and "Palace of Treason." His third novel will be published next spring.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Imaginative and nimble, best-selling historical fiction writer O'Nan (West of Sunset, 2015) is a master of narrative distillation, and in his latest taut novel, set in British-ruled Jerusalem immediately after WWII, he achieves thriller-like suspense. Brand, a Latvian Jew and a mechanic, lost his entire family in the Holocaust and endured internment in Russian and German camps. Bereft, he makes his way to the city and finds work as a taxi driver, shepherding tourists around military checkpoints to visit holy sites, journeys that allow O'Nan to offer incandescent and incisive descriptions of this tinder box of antiquity and modernity, the sacred and the profane this city in revolt, riven by curfews, searches, arrests, secrets, and betrayals. Haunted by memories of his loved ones and traumatized by survivor's guilt, Brand finds himself involved with Eva, another Jewish refugee, who is getting by as a prostitute, and through her, the Jewish Resistance movement. O'Nan provides a bare-bones context for the covert battle to overthrow the British and establish a Jewish state, focusing, instead, on the complex, wrenching sorrow driving gentle, romantic, traumatized Brand, a lover of fireflies and white nights, as he seeks love, meaning, and atonement. O'Nan's engrossing portrait of an innocent caught in the web of history cues us to view today's horrific Middle East struggles with compassion. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Promotion will be energetic for perennially popular O'Nan's new release, with author appearances and interviews and plenty of social media coverage.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Jerusalem under British occupation in the years immediately following World War II serves as the backdrop for O'Nan's (West of Sunset) intriguing new novel, a Conradian espionage thriller leavened with existential introspection. Its protagonist is Jossi Brand, a Latvian Jew who survived the concentration camps owing to his skills as a mechanic, and who now drives a cab for a living. One of the many refugees who snuck into Palestine in the late 1940s and lived an underground existence under an assumed name, Brand has drifted into a cell of the Haganah, a resistance group fighting for Jewish independence that begins sending him on increasingly dangerous and desperate missions, the tragic outcome of which seems inevitable. As depicted by O'Nan, Brand's world is one of murky uncertainties, where betrayal by cell members is as likely as arrest by the authorities, and the secretiveness of resistance operations sows suspicion and paranoia among the cell members. Brand's personal psychological torment compounds these effects: the only member of his family to survive the war, he is wracked with pangs of survivor's guilt, and his earnest attempts to regain his sense of dignity through his love for Eva, a prostitute who has also lost everything, are rebuffed out of his fear that he'll become too close to her. O'Nan's novel works on several levels, but it is especially memorable as a story where the tortured emotions of its characters are indistinguishable from the turmoil of the chaotic events that overwhelm them. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Company. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Setting his latest novel in post-World War II Jerusalem, master storyteller O'Nan (West of Sunset) focuses on the Jewish underground movement during Israel's fight for independence. Yossi Brand, a Holocaust survivor from Latvia, joins the Haganah and works as a taxi driver, transporting members to increasingly dangerous secret meetings and missions-until he realizes he is in over his head. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The protean O'Nan (West of Sunset, 2015, etc.) assumes the mantle of Conrad and Greene in a probing, keening thriller set in Jerusalem just after World War II. Brand, a Latvian Jew, lost his entire family in the Holocaust and is haunted by the passivity with which he watched fellow inmates tortured and killed in the camps. Determined not to be a victim again, he has come to Jerusalem and joined Haganah, one of several resistance groups determined to oust the British from Palestine and establish a Jewish state. Brand's cover job is driving a taxi, and one of his tasks is to ferry fellow cell member Eva to assignations as a prostitute, through which she gathers information. In their off-hours the pair are lovers, which fills Brand with guilt for betraying his murdered wife. He's not totally at ease, either, with his cell's bombings and armed robberies, particularly when Haganah joins forces with the more violently radical Irgun "after calling them dissidents and terrorists and helping the British hunt them down." The ironies echoing down to today's Jerusalem are evident, although O'Nan stays meticulously within his 1945-6 framework. As soon as Brand starts taking Eva to the King David Hotel for repeated trysts, even readers unfamiliar with Middle Eastern history will sense that apocalyptic events are impending. When they arrive, in the novel's grim climax, they make palpable the dilemma of O'Nan's conflicted protagonist: "He wanted the revolutionlike the worldto be innocent, when it had never been." Though rigorously unsentimental, the text seethes with unresolved emotions, as when Brand celebrates a solitary Passover, missing Eva and pierced by memories of his dead parents and sister. He's heartbreakingly lonely and appealingly ambivalent in a world where too many people are certain the righteousness of their cause justifies any action. Economical and deliberately low-key, like all O'Nan's work, but the complex moral issues it raises linger unsettlingly. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2016 Stewart O'Nan 1 When the war came Brand was lucky, spared death because he was young and could fix an engine, unlike his wife Katya and his mother and father and baby sister Giggi, unlike his grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. A Latvian and a Jew, he was interned first by the Russians, then the Germans, then the Russians again. By chance, he lived. While he was tempted almost daily (really, nightly), he wasn't enough of a fatalist to return the gift. The winter after the war, with no home to go back to and no graves to venerate, he signed on a Maltese freighter and landed in Jerusalem, realizing his mother's lifelong dream. In their dining room in Riga hung a bad lithograph of the walled city like a fortress out of  Beau Geste,  its stone golden in the numinous desert light. At the end of the seder, his Grandfather Udelson raised his glass to it. "Next year in Jerusalem." For Brand it was next year, without sweetness. Like so many refugees, he drove a taxi, provided, like his papers, by the underground. His new name was Jossi. His job to listen--again, lucky, since as a prisoner he had years of experience. With his fair hair and grade school Hebrew, he could be trusted. The British soldiers, the blissful pilgrim gawking tourists all wanted to talk. They spoke to him as if he were slow, leaning in close behind his ear, shaping each syllable. Where was he from? What did he think of the trials? How did he like living in Jerusalem? "I like it;" the man he was pretending to be said, instead of "It's better than the camps," or "I like living," or, honestly, "I don't know." The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouin bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions--everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past. The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. A wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He'd lost too much weight during the war and couldn't get warm. When he ran out kerosene, his contact Asher brought him a jerry can liberated from their masters. Nightly the streetlights flickered and the power went out. His flop overlooked an Armenian cemetery where the whores took the soldiers after the bars closed, their electric torches weaving between the crypts. The rain fell on the domes and bell towers and minarets, filling the ancient cisterns beneath the Old City, fell on Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives and the desert beyond, thunder cracking over the Dead Sea. The dankness reminded Brand of his grandmother's root cellar. As a boy he was afraid the door at the top of the rough stairs would swing closed of its own weight, the latch catching, leaving him in darkness. Now he imagined her hiding there, dirty-cheeked, surviving on jarred beets and horseradish, but of course she couldn't be. The house, the town, the entire country was gone. Sometimes in the night when his dreams and the lightning wouldn't let him sleep, he dressed and went down to his taxi, an old black Peugeot he kept buffed to a mirror-like shine, and drove through the Zion Gate checkpoint into the Old City, as if he were going to pick up a fare, to see the widow. Her name was Eva, but when Asher had recommended her, he called her The Widow as if it were a code name, and though Brand widower himself, he couldn't get it out of his head. She would always be another's, that dead love private, untouchable. How, after everything, was he still proud? There were worse things than second best. Eva, his new Juliet, his new Eve. From Vilna, the Jerusalem of the North, with an urbane scorn for backward Latvia. She was older than Brand by more than a decade, her eyes baggy, her jet hair threaded with gray. Before the war she'd been an actress known for her Nora and Lady Macbeth. She wished she had her clippings to show him. In the right light he could see she'd been striking once, the dark hair and sky-blue eyes, high cheekbones and generous lips, but at the corner of her mouth a deep scar had healed badly, the nerve severed so that one side drooped in an exaggerated frown, like the mask of tragedy. Like Brand, she hated the Russians and Germans equally, absolutely. She was a joke among their cell, a ruined woman, useful for one thing. When she drank, she railed against the world, calling all men pigs. "Not you," she said. "You're like me." How? he wanted to ask, but was afraid of the answer. When she cried after lovemaking or while they ate breakfast at her small table, he knew it was for her husband, whose name she wouldn't say. Brand had no money, and they'd come to a loose arrangement he soon regretted. He was forbidden to mention the word love, would be banished at the first hint of romance. She was not his, merely a comrade. She taught him Hebrew and English a phrase at a time, correcting his fledgling attempts with her perfect articulation, as if training him for the stage. In return, he chauffeured her to her assignations, waiting discreetly across the street, smoking and reading the paper, trying not to think of Katya, whose memory had sustained him in the camps and through the long, starry watches at sea. After Katya, whatever happened to him was nothing. The world was not the world. Tonight the Zion Gate was jammed, traffic backed up along the wall, the rain falling in long needles through a red fog of exhaust. The line was stopped. In the stark wash of floodlights shining down from the sandbagged ramparts, soldiers were going from car to car with dogs, opening doors, pulling people out. The police hadn't called curfew in weeks. There must have been an action, though the radio said nothing. He tried the underground station at the far end of the dial and got a blast of static. Ahead, a soldier with a tommy gun was frisking a gray-bearded Arab in full robes and headdress while a dog nosed about inside the car, a grave insult if the man were Moslem, dogs being unclean. It was quite possible the man was a Christian; many of them were. Brand, being a transplant, couldn't tell them apart. He was more concerned that the dog would muddy his seats, and wished he hadn't thrown away his paper. It was too late to turn around, and he shut off his engine to save gas. His papers were false, as was the Peugeot's registration, the car itself stolen from Tel Aviv, repainted and fitted with a smuggler's false-bottomed trunk. If taken in for questioning, Brand had no defense. He'd be detained as an illegal and a thief, interrogated, then jailed or deported, but all the times he'd been stopped, all the checkpoints he'd braved, the police had never challenged him. While his documents--like current life, he might say--were passable forgeries, his license, a metal badge attached to the front bumper, and much harder to come by, was real. And yet, having been arrested before--once, in Riga, sitting in his booth in his favorite coffee shop--he knew that as a Jew you were never safe. Excerpted from City of Secrets: A Novel by Stewart O'Nan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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