Talking to the Enemy

J.L. Granatstein, distinguished research professor emeritus of history
at York University. He is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and
co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the
20th Century, Prime Ministers: Ranking

These short stories by an Israeli turned Canadian are rough-edged but
vigorous. Set in the recent past, they deal with sex and soldiering,
spying, and the tensions between Arabs and Israelis,

and men and women. The language is crude,

some of the translated epithets sounding particularly shocking to
delicate North American ears, but there is no denying the energy of
these stories.

Here we have a father-in-law taking his daughter’s husband to a Paris
brothel (his treat), complaining about his wife’s coldness, and
providing the secret number to his Swiss bank account. Here, too, we
have an Israeli hit squad taking revenge for a PLO suicide attack on a
day-care centre by launching a strike at a Moroccan-based Palestinian
terrorist. One member of the squad, the protagonist, having lost his son
in the terrorist attack, somehow talks his way onto the team. After
training, after covert insertion into Morocco and the PLO compound, he
finally faces the PLO thug, only to discover to his horror that the
terrorist is holding his own son. We might expect the protagonist to
fail to fire; not here, however. After a mere 1.5 second pause, he kills
both the official and the child.

Avner Mandelman’s stories, published elsewhere in good journals,
deserve to be read in Canada.