War in Paradise: Arnold Zweig’s novel “De Vriendt returns home”

In 1932, Arnold Zweig published a crime novel in which the conflict over Palestine was described in all its complexity. The time for a new edition couldn’t have been better.

The first suspicion naturally falls on the Arabs. The Orthodox Jew Yitzchak Josef de Vriendt was murdered; he was a poet, lawyer and fighter for the spirit of the Torah. And he was a pedophile. His love – or more precisely his drive – was for his student, the Palestinian boy Saud. His distinguished family had discovered de Vriendt. Who could doubt that it was Saud’s brother who killed him with three shots in Jerusalem on a summer evening in 1929? But it wasn’t the Arabs. The reader learns early on what almost everyone in Jerusalem considers unthinkable: Yitzchak Josef de Vriendt was murdered by Zionists.