Acts of Terror and Contrition: a nuclear fable about Israel - now available.

If you have read the excerpts from Acts of Terror and Contrition and find them (or the following description of my new novel) intriguing, you may buy the book by clicking on the cover image to the side here, on the title to this post, or on the Amazon.com link at the end of this post.


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 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 Operations Chief’s covert threats to force world governments to face what is at stake should Iraq launch 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 ministers as well as his staff members’ rebellion against the extremity of his plan. 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 dangerous extremity of Arie’s plan, the old man summonses all his wisdom and his wily, struggling will to confront his son.

Acts is a literary novella, a version of the sacrifice of Isaac, about the unrecorded acts of terror and contrition which arise in 1990 within this circle of characters as their lives move toward a powerful and compelling climax. It is simultaneously a political thriller propelling us through dangerous close-calls and suspenseful political decisions in foreign capitals. It is also a powerful alternative history presenting a secret history of Israel’s part in the Desert Storm War. Above all, the novella explores the dread and opposition human beings feel toward the danger of nuclear radiation and nuclear weapons.

Eight stories of the nineteen-eighties accompany the novella, and these works record more personal “acts of terror and contrition” during the decade of Reagan and the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories cast a stark light – both ironic and sympathetic – upon the resinous hearts of these characters feeding what flames upon the troubled nights of the eighties. Both the novella and the stories in Acts of Terror and Contrition testify to the fraying connections between the personal and political, national identity and common humanity. And just as politics and identity are entwined here, so too are the forms the stories take: political fiction meshes with a thriller; raw slices of life yield the wholeness of a family chronicle; Americans come face to face with a range of strangers and specters; headlines haunt works of literary fiction.

In the first story after the novella, the wry secular Jewish owner of a New York toy company is visited one night in 1980 (Einstein's centennial year) by the spirit of the genius, and together they mourn the part the Jewish physicist played in developing the nuclear bomb. In another story set later in the eighties, a young professor creates a haunted, incendiary poem in response to the film “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” as he faces an inner breakdown before the needs of wife, mentor, department chair, and a famed visiting Russian poet. In the third and fourth stories, two elderly characters – one an Armenian-American, the other the Greek widow of an eminent German-Jewish expatriate pianist – seek the energy and clarity to go on in the face of maddening infirmities and the incomprehension of others. In the fifth story, 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 chronicle the life of a multi-ethnic American painter born in the forties, from his traumatic childhood, through his youthful trespasses, to his difficulty in finding balance – of communicating – in marriage and beyond; the third story in the trilogy portrays a last chance he has to break the cycle of failed communication and to right himself as a father to his teen-aged son, who himself struggles to maintain his humanity in the America of 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

You may get a copy of the book from Amazon.com via the following link:




My next post will be an attempt to explore some works of certain precursors of the modern novel.

Notes on the modern period - 2 -main features of the modern

In thinking about the previous post, I realize that those intriguing above-listed qualities of the modern can appear to be abstruse and difficult to a fault, particularly in the context of university study (as opposed to the context of the active and initiated practitioner, whether artist or scientist). So in order to work through that difficulty, I think it would be good to note a few illustrative examples for those “features of the modern.”


Perhaps autonomy and independence of vantage point (and structure of thought) are best exemplified by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which proposes a radically new alternative physics to that developed by Newton; Einstein’s leap of thought is strikingly independent of previous assumptions in physics. Autonomy can be manifested also in abstraction, for example in Picasso’s analytical cubism paintings – abstract in both content and structure – with their geometric forms achieving an expressiveness independent of any represented subject. Abstraction can obliterate the content of a representation, as it begins to do in the female figure on the right side of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, whose shape is a set of lines and planes and whose face is a geometrical mask. That canvas also illustrates the primitivism central to modernity, for the female figure on the left side of the painting are sensuously immediate, rendered with a vivid undulating line; the middle images of women are increasingly geometrical.

Of course, the modernist effort to confront the nature of immediacy, of the “moment” in consciousness and perception, is at the root of much of its literature and philosophy, from Walter Pater through Husserl, say, or Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf. Like the combination of abstraction and immediacy in their renderings of the stream of perception, Picasso’s Demoiselles painting – simultaneously sensuous and geometric – illustrates the paradoxical coexistence of the abstract and the momentary, of apparently opposed qualities in a single work or concept (suggesting the pervasive ambiguity central to much modernist production). Contradiction and paradox in the modern are related to modernist perspectivism or relativity/relativism (in the layperson’s sense of Einstein or Nietzsche’s thought, the latter reminding us of the accompanying risk of nihilism). “Very well, I contradict myself,” Whitman writes, a few decades before the full development of the modern.

The exploration of “the stream of consciousness” in the work of modern novelists and philosophers is also a part of the commitment to realism in this period. And the term realism signals equally a modern ethos of confrontation, and the need to critique society among modernists of all political persuasions culminates in the act (on the part, say, of Spengler or of T. S. Eliot) of judging the entire course of Western civilization up to the modern period. The fierce critique of society and culture can result in a destabilization of tradition, of received convention, and manifest itself as negation, rebellion, or subversive freedom (think of the intentional subversions of sense in the poetry of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé).

Charged by all of these forces, modern thought is characterized above all by an openness to experiment and change across the arts, the natural sciences, and the new social sciences – yielding new concepts, approaches, and achievements, and these changes can be seen as representing a paradigm shift, an incommensurable development of a new “disciplinary matrix” in each field (from physics to psychology, musical composition to literature). Given these radical changes and a resulting destabilization as well as the great disillusionment arising from – among other ‘factors’ – the unprecedentedly destructive wars, the modern is beset by a sense of cultural mourning and belatedness. Understandably, as a result, modern thought seeks even a fragmentary, transfiguring unity of vision, a sort of healing order or at least healing process in the face of change and collapse, and the newly liberated quest for a transfigured fullness of experience yields a dangerous sense of the death of the ordinary self – evident in Yeats’ and Rilke’s poetry (and prefigured even by Keats’s Odes).