Alfred Bodenheimer’s crime novel “Murder on the Street of 29 November” – Culture

The murder happened just around the corner: Ruchama Wacholder, member of the Knesset, was shot dead along with her husband on Straße des 29. November, a normally quiet residential area, when they were quite innocently walking the dog in the evening. It’s an act that stirs up half of Israel, but the man behind this murder plot is now sitting completely relaxed in a café in Jerusalem’s “German Colony”. He wears a white polo shirt with his white kippa and confesses with a slight Swiss tongue: “Of course I checked the escape route. I live around here.”

Alfred Bodenheimer has just published his first Jerusalem thriller, “Mord in der Straße des 29. November” (Murder on November 29th Street), and it contains everything that concerns the 56-year-old in his adopted country of Israel: big politics, the eternal conflict with the Palestinians and even the little worries of his protagonists. It’s not a “hard blood crime”, he admits. Rather, it is a parable of society – and in any case it is something completely different from anything else the author deals with.

In Jerusalem, a woman is now investigating, secular to boot

In real life, beyond the criminal milieu, Bodenheimer is a professor of Jewish literature and religious history at the University of Basel. He is currently working on a work entitled The Language of God. His seminars deal with topics such as the “concept of power in Judaism” or the pluralism model of the recently deceased British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He writes detective stories to balance things out: “Freud calls it the discharge of instincts,” he says, “so you can write anything off your chest without hesitation.”

He doesn’t read crime novels himself, but he published his first in 2014. In Zurich, a main character named Rabbi Gabriel Klein, who lives there, is investigating. It now has a loyal readership, and the precise milieu studies are particularly praised. “I actually know the Jewish community there inside out,” says Bodenheimer.

Jerusalem is something different, even if he has lived here at least partly for many years. The family is there, the academic job is in Switzerland, Bodenheimer is a commuter between the worlds. “The physical stress of traveling is less than the psychological one because of the changeover,” he says. In Switzerland “everything is organized and predictable, with a rehearsed slowness”. Israel, on the other hand: “Everything is always up to date. Unpredictability is the only thing you can count on.”

After six Zurich crime books, he nevertheless ventured into new territory, and so thoroughly that a woman investigated in Jerusalem, and she was secular at that: Kenny Glass is a psychologist in the service of the police. She is not only professionally involved in the Wacholder murder case, but is also personally involved through a long-standing acquaintance with the victims. After all, Israel is a small country, but one with some pretty big problems.

Kenny Glass’s family is a microcosm of the fractured Jewish Israeli society

Bodenheimer gets straight into the problems of his adopted country with the title: Because November 29, after which the street at the crime scene is named, stands for a memorable date in Israel’s history. On this day in 1947, the majority of the UN General Assembly voted to divide the former British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. “The day was filled with hopes that have since been dashed, at least on the moral and political side,” he says. Today Israel is “a country that has trouble keeping to a few basic principles of democracy”.

Bodenheimer’s concern that Israel’s “democracy is going under the wheels” is reflected in the characters as well as in the plot of the thriller. The family of his investigator appears as a microcosm of the rugged Jewish-Israeli society. Kenny Glass himself stands for the critical patriots whose love for the country and for the people is repeatedly put to the test. Her mother was once involved in the Oslo peace process, and her father, as a nationalist, belongs to the right-wing camp, which is far from peace. The brother is traumatized by the terror, the daughter is disillusioned and pragmatic.

Open detailed view

Everything almost like in real life. The criminal case takes place in the times of the Corona lockdowns 2020/21 in a country that is both paralyzed and heated up at the same time: one parliamentary election follows the next, and there is a prime minister who everyone recognizes immediately because of his “sonorous voice”, his corruption processes and his rapacious family – but who is never mentioned by name. “It’s not about Benjamin Netanyahu for me,” says Bodenheimer, “it’s more about the structures.” The traces of the murder of parliamentarian Wacholder first point across to the Palestinians, then up to the highest echelons of politics. But of course there are other twists as well.

Bodenheimer names all those “who are fundamentally interested in Jerusalem, in the atmosphere here” as a target group. You will learn a lot about history and current affairs, about backgrounds and abysses. If it is up to the Swiss publisher Kampa, which publishes his crime novels, then the Zurich Rabbi Klein should probably have a chance again in the next book. Alfred Bodenheimer himself, however, sees the need for clarification elsewhere. “I think this will be another Jerusalem thriller.”