Drawing Blood

...One of his wives, the long-legged and glamorous ex-kibbutznik and Army major Carmela Yovel, had struck it rich in the States offering catalogs full of dream gifts—diamond necklaces from Cartier, trips to Paris, Jaguars "loaded to the teeth"—for under $50...

...or rather, where others may have doubts, questions, hopes, Yehudi, victim and victor, has a well-practiced rant...

...The author's inventiveness seems to have disappeared here...

...invoking the dema-goguery of easy sentiment whenever his speeches need a little boost in wattage...

...The General, at the very least, is about to discover how he has simplified and underestimated Yehudi, who it turns out has meant every word he has spoken...

...This is the same absolute belief in The Word that led Jim Jones' adulators to cyanide and David Koresh's to fire: that life on the "enemy's" terms is not truly life...

...Her Jewishness was only one aspect of her identity...

...Given Carmela's cheerfully irreverent attitude toward reality, it is no surprise that she meets her future husband when, in preparation for the day "the State of Israel in one of its inevitable phases of suicidal, self-destructive folly and dementia, considers returning the land for a flimsy peace agreement no more substantial than what she had offered in her catalogs...

...Could anyone, for instance, take himself more seriously than a man with a degree from Yeshiva University's School of Social Work and a goodly number of years of summer camp experience who thus feels prepared to lead his people back to their Biblically mandated borders even if it drives them to a new Masada...

...There is another splendid skewering of cliche when, many years later...

...Like a woman, for example...

...she brings him a marvelous new proposition: Using her tested techniques, she will stock the West Bank with non-ideological householders looking for a good deal...

...author, "Before and After," "Civil Wars " AS IT BEGINS to be clear what Tova Reich's characters are up to in The Jewish War, readers will be either delighted or scandalized, depending on the particulars of their piety and their political perspective...

...Only briefly, there are similarly uneven forays into feminist Biblical criticism, new perhaps to Malkie, one of The Wives, but not unfamiliar to the rest of us...

...Whether Josephus, whose chronicles of the Roman Conquest Reich's book is named for, was a reliable historian or a fabulator does not matter here: Yehudi and his minions share the zealots' creed (which for the Jews comes, uncut, from the establishment of Israel's borders in the 11th chapter of Deuteronomy...

...Among the women, gathered separately to watch the anointment, are his three wives (for this is a man who knows how to take full advantage of a useful tradition...

...Early in the novel there is some terrific tall-tale telling: A Ukrainian thug is beaten back by wit alone, and in a riotously funny scene Jerry and Herbie, desperate to do their bit in the Six-Day War, hitch a plane ride to Israel in a manner the most perspicacious travel agent would not recommend...

...Had the messianic crew not been so roundly assaulted in the first three quarters of her book, I would have wondered if the author was trumping us with a statement of faith herself, snuck in at the last to take us by surprise...

...She was catering to an authentic human need—the need to consume, the need for a palliative to anxiety, sorrow and disappointment...

...In the end, though, after so many deli-ciously deranged moments when Reich lets her characters walk over the edge...

...Although it would have been intriguing to hear some speculation about how a prince dares to imagine himself a king, this seems exactly right for him: All we see is his resolve, and his ever-unrepentant behavior...

...thank God...

...Just as certain saints are portrayed in myth, Yehudi HaGoel seems to have been born whole, his mind focused on his mission...

...Anybody who has ever logged a summer in a place that featured bunks, mosquitoes and paying guests demanding service has met these Borscht Belt boychiks...

...Choose death, I say," the King intones in the cavernous underground stone hall, abutting the Cave of Machpelah where he and his followers sequester themselves in their last days...

...But maybe an alternation of effects is only appropriate for a book about Israel, where triviality, historical grandeur, existential absurdity, secular realpolitik, and cosmic transcendence vie for supremacy on every street corner, every day of the week, shabbat included...

...becomes his rebbe...

...Well, yes, we have assumed as much from the start...

...Good satire has to work the way comic actors do, has to take its subjects as seriously as they take themselves and trust that, if allowed to exercise their pretensions, they will reveal their absurdities...

...Yehudi is suspected of having abandoned one of his children on a rooftop—the daughter whose modest name, At'halta D'Geula, means "The beginning of the redemption"—in the course of leading a last-ditch struggle to prevent the Israeli withdrawal from Yamit...

...Though the trivialities of American Jewish life have been noted before, still the summer girlfriends are perfect...

...This is so lively, intelligent, disturbing, and irreverent a novel that I wish its tone had not wobbled into earnestness at the end...

...she was catering to the sphere of human fantasy, wishful thinking, and soothing self-deception...

...even as she smiles at their yearnings: Her-bie/Hoshea's Faith (who will change her name to its Hebrew translation, Emunah, when she makes alivah) has gone from Brooklyn College to the Peace Corps, and thence to Israel, in spite of her desire for some nondesolate—that is, non-Jewish—fun...

...Reich doesn't bother to fashion a childhood, or a set of family or intellectual dynamics for the Jewish Prince...

...Poor Emunah has a different understanding of what they are there for...

...Because the author appears determined to show us what such meshugas can lead to, she concludes on another note altogether, as if to remind us that this isn't mischief, folks, it's serious tragedy...

...First comes the touching situation of two of the children, the one who represents redemption simply lost—her face withdrawn, her father says, grimly accepting it—and the other, Golana Yentel Genendel Kugel Goldberg HaGoel, murdered on a march through the West Bank...

...Anything not to be considered harmless...

...Life in America has deprived him of the chance to "pull out all his Jewish guns and show what he can do," so when it suits him Martin Luther King Jr...

...The idea that one of them might grow into the King of the Occupied Territories is enough to make a reader blanch with terrified anticipation...

...a Jew...

...And even in the midst of triumph, at the slightest opportunity the obsessed Yehudi indulges a familiar penchant for making everything a metaphor for the destruction of the Jewish people...

...Getting to see them in their American incarnations is the equivalent of encountering the Childhood of the Poet in all its awesome unlikeliness...

...Her worth is therefore enhanced in Jerry/Yehudi's eyes, yet also rendered a little impersonal: She is said to be "a suitable starter match" for the savior-to-be...

...Paradoxically, when she lets them speak and do things that are all too plausibly realistic, her sharpness is blunted, her irony withers...

...Wouldn't a transcript of an extreme fundamentalist cult leader's last words to the world—unironic, unmocked, unexag-gerated—sound very much like the final pages of The Jewish War...

...Reader, she marries him: after sufficient time and complication, she will come to regret it...

...No longer the helpless demonstrator whose disruptions were tolerated and ignored in the Land of the Free, this time Yehudi is confident he can pierce the hard hide of the State...

...she was more than just Jewish...

...The Jewish War seems to want to have it both ways...

...leaps from his mouth at the sight of catastrophe, no matter how remote...

...Oh, yeah...

...the place at the opening of the book is the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, that burial crypt studded with the illustrious names of the patriarchs and matriarchs?Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah...

...He is the one major character without an inner life...

...True, too, the day job Yehudi hurries off to after the ceremony is something less than exalted: He is a tour guide who not only leads groups to sites of magnificent sacrifice, notably Masada, but also helps them to "fulfill each point in their travel agents' itineraries in order to justifiably earn the reward of a shopping break...

...The children, restless, have been kept occupied by the game of Holocaust, the ultimate color war competition whose grand prize winner is to be given a free, all-expenses-paid trip to Auschwitz...

...their secular devotion to "shopping malls and paneled family rooms and their tots on trikes" will dilute the ideologues and turn any attempt to remove them into a "potentially damaging public relations and humanitarian affair of annulling vast mortgages and razing entire suburbs...

...But is it satire when a reader thinks?put sympathy or repulsion aside for the moment?Yes, all this sounds exactly like what these people might say...

...An aberration, obviously, a mistake, an unfortunate omission brought about in the heat and passion of the moment...

...In fact—since satire is a fairly blunt instrument without much use for psychological subtlety—they may be the only characters Reich treats with poignance...

...Whether he has an exalted notion of his power we are not privileged to learn...

...The seriously apocalyptic closing chapters abandon its broad comic style, put aside its slyness...

...he is depicted as a phenomenon, perfectly finished at the start...

...Above, helicopters of the Israel Defense Forces hover intrusiveTrue, there is something a trifle less than Biblical about the Pyrex measuring cup that contains the olive oil with which the King is to be anointed...

...If so, she is traveling with the wrong set of companions...

...The time is an unspecific near future...

...Certainly, Hoshea agreed, a Jewish woman...

...Now her targets include Israeli as well as American Jewish life and the politics of peace, of Israeli-Arab coexistence, of land repatriation—all the nagging little questions that might arise when a Bronx boy named Jerry Goldberg, rebom at the Homeland's border Yehudi HaGoel, has himself anointed King of secessionist Judea and Samaria...

...It could have happened to anyone under the circumstances...

...Why, then, his dereliction of parental duty...

...But most of The Jewish War\s far more ingenious than that, and funniest when its critical teeth are sharp enough to draw blood...

...Michelle Kugel, alumna of Barnard, is the hotel owner's daughter...

...After all, this was Israel, and everything in Israel was pitched at a higher level of drama, intensity, and what might, to citizens of other lands, appearto be craziness, but that was the power and the wonder of the place, there was no mistaking that you were alive...

...We do, however, hear his longtime antagonist, General Uri Lapidot, register his skepticism about the events at Masada...

...Choosing death, Yehudi announces, is "the most bitter blow that we can inflict upon the State of Israel, a shock from which it can never recover...

...the "scheme" sounds much too literal to be satire...

...But she marries Yehudi anyway, another victim of his chutzpah, his charismatic presence, which "turned into vapor the question 'Who does he think he is?' as it was emerging from between the skeptic's lips: without being able to define his effect exactly, it was undeniable that Yehudi HaGoel was somebody...

...Remember the ovens...

...To throw off a pair of prying social workers, he buys her a ton of "correct" toys and represents his polygamous household as a "normal home...

...In these pages a second Masada (with a sidelong glance at Jonestown) is the inevitable, if not logical, outcome?unresisted, welcomed even, the way people who have a suicide in their family tend to yield to their own annihilation more readily than those who have to conceive it from scratch...

...She was tired of the anxiety that gripped her...

...She writes to an old Peace Corps friend?with whom she had worked in Guyana?that unlike the centuries of people who came to the Holy Land to die, "the novelty of Zionism was the idea of coming here to live...

...Tova Reich is at her quite remarkable best when she trusts her high-spirited inventiveness and lets her characters innocently betray their outrageous self-justifications, the myths they spin to explain themselves...

...Then again, it is unlikely that many of the potentially affronted would find themselves tempted in the first place to open a novel by the woman who, in Master of the Return, satirized Chasidic life...

...Rescued on the brink of her deflowering one night on the hotel golf course, the ambivalent Shelly is "like the young Dostoyevsky before the firing squad, reprieved, like the rogue Macheath by Queen Victoria's mounted messenger, saved in the nick of time" by her father, "King Kugel, the god out of the machine...

...Jerry Goldberg and his more modest sidekick, Herbie "Hubba-Hubba" Levy, were big men on the Catskill camp and hotel circuit whose interests ran from Zionist dreams of glory to making time with girls and back again...

...It could have been us...

...until she could ascertain that the latest assassin or murderer or rapist or all-purpose criminal was not...

...Yehudi is surrounded in the stone courtyard by his selflessly devoted minions, West Bank settlers eager to finish once and for all this nasty business of sharing space with the Arabs, who have been "house sitters" through the long years of Jewish exile...

...The courts didn't view it that way, forcing her to flee "to the safety of perilous Israel...

...He is not beyond wailing "Remember the camps...

...Then, on Yom Kippur, the final battle is joined...

...Like what else was she, for example...