Shmuel KatzReseñas

I was excited to get "The Aaronsohn Saga" to review. I love history and am always amazed at the heroes produced during times of war. I became fascinasted by the story of Aaron Aaronsohn and his sister Sarah.

Aaron grew up in a Jewish agricultural settlement and studied agriculture and botany. During World War I, the Aaronsohns created a spy ring known as Nili and worked with the British against the Turks. The story also covers the politics of the time. There are horrible things that happen as well as examples of courage and strength. This is a family that helped shape a region.

I usually don’t read stories of violence or such sadness, but this book provided such good information about a time and place I know very little about. It is well worth the read for anyone interested in the history of the region.½

This was an Early Review Book from Librarything. Although it's not one I would have chosen on my own (I enjoy history, but this was not a place or time I'd previously had much interest in), it is a compelling read about a remarkable scientist and spy iin the cause of a liberated Jewish state around the time of World War I. Aaron Aaronsohn started a Jewish spy organization, NILI, to provide information and support to the British in the hope that the end result would be a self-governing Jewish state. The intrigue, courage and betrayals that followed make for an interesting read. I was particularly surprised to find out what a low opinion Aaronsohn and others had of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who is described here as an anti-Semite and a true charlatan.½

I was somewhat nervous about getting "The Aaronsohn Saga" to review. While I love stories of naturalists, and stories about spies, and stories about World War I, I know very little about Zionism or the early history of the Israeli state. And this book, which I am reading in the new English translation of a Hebrew original, does expect a certain level of familiarity, with the people involved if not the specific events.

That's part of the benefit of the book for me - this book was written in Israel for an Israeli audience, and so I don't expect to know all the background, any more than I'd expect a born and raised Israeli to know the details of the Arnold/Andre conspiracy. Reading history written by the other is always a valuable experience, and particularly for an American reading about and event like the World Wars, where the American narrative is, ah, singular. So this book did feel foreign, and to some extent that was a distancing effect that I had to force myself to work past.

Luckily, the story this book tells is so gripping that I got pulled into it anyway. There is adventure and tragedy, star-crossed romance and arranged marriage, science and war, politics and idealism, personality and pragmatism. It focuses on the story of Aaron Aaronsohn, a remarkable man who had the ability to see clearly and the passion to turn his vision into reality at a great turning-point in history. The book covers his early life as the child of a pioneering Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine, his scientific training and his work in botany and agronomy as he created - from the ground up - a U.S funded scientific station near his hometown, and his involvement (not always happy) in world Zionism and local Palstinian politics. As WWI comes to the Middle East he tries to find a way to harness the resources of his people to turn the outcome of the war to a victory for the Jewish state.

The story really picks up when Aaron and friends finally manage to establish a working relationship with the British and create a secret, daring spy network called Nili throughout Turkish-controlled (and German-allied) Palestine, a collective of fearless and dedicated young and old people, men and women, accomplishing amazing things with almost no resources and in the face of constant danger - a danger that finally caught up with them, just weeks before the British victory that they had helped to build.

This book does suffer in some ways. It exhibits what seems to be the common problem of historians working closely from paper sources - the book gives time and space to events based on how well-documented they are, rather than how important they are, so we get chapters and chapters of Aaron, frustrated and fighting the British bureacracy in minute detail, while the exciting and vital things happening among the members on the ground in Nili are summarized and mostly crammed into one chapter. Similarly, the publisher's blurbs talked about how the title of the book became "The Aaronsohn Saga" because Aaron's sister Sarah played such an important role in the events, and yet it seems like she got little more than the occasional passing mention and a grand death scene. And then there's another Aaronsohn sibling, Alex, who keeps popping into the narrative to do something activist, intriguing and barely descibed - and then disappearing with no elaboration as soon as his story isn't directly intersecting Aaron's. I feel like this would be a much richer book if it truly was the saga of all the Aaronsohns and of Nili instead of what seems to be, in places, little more than an annotation of Aaron's diary. On a similar note. parts of the book descend almost into panegyric, reading like a praise-song for Aaron at the expense of other parts of the story, and spend a lot of time telling up how amazing he is during periods where what he's doing is mostly fruitlessly fighting bureaucracy and alienating potential allies. I understand that nobody (even Aaron Aaronsohn) is a perfect human being; in a biography I'd rather have his imperfections explored than have them excused.

That said, this was a deeply interesting look at a fascinating personality and a perspective of history that was little known to me, and I'm glad I got a chance to read it.

This book is a tribute to Aaron Aaronsohn, his sister Sarah, and others who formed the “NILI” espionage organization in WWI Palestine to assist the British from behind Turkish lines. (NILI is the acronym for the Hebrew phrase “the eternity of Israel will not lie.”) The goal of NILI was to see Britain take trusteeship over Palestine with eventual independence for a Jewish homeland. Also, aware of the genocide of Armenians by the Turks, NILI feared the Jews might be next without British intervention. This is an inspiring story, and one not widely known. Many Americans are familiar with the brave and ferocious leaders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but not so with the early heroes of Zionism, reflecting, I presume, the still politically charged nature of the existence of Israel. The stories of the young NILI martyrs will stay with you after you learn of their courage and travails. Nevertheless, I have a number of criticisms of this author’s presentation.

Let’s start with the title. Frankly, it just doesn’t do the story justice. How would anyone know to care about this story?

Only one map is included, showing the scope of NILI’s activities within a small area inside Palestine. But because most of the story involves the logistics of travel between Palestine and other parts of the Levant, a map of the whole Middle East and Anatolia would have been helpful.

Too many details bog down the narrative. For each operative, we get a recitation of the complete family tree. At times I felt like I was reading Numbers in The Torah.

We are hurled into the adventures of Aaronsohn in medias res, and set into a literary thicket of trees. What forest are we in? Why was the Zionist movement so important to Jews and in particular to these Jews of NILI? One minute they’re farmers and researchers; the next they are ardent Zionist spies. What happened?

We also don’t learn until page 211 what the British-Zionist relationship is all about or why Palestine mattered at all to the British. (On the former topic the author makes an interesting point about the British Cabinet’s declaration in favor of Jewish aspirations: “…not intended as an act of altruism towards the Jewish people, but a political undertaking aimed at turning the sympathies of Russian and American Jews (many of them neutral or even pro-German) towards the Allies. It was needed moreover as a preemptive coup in view of a possible pro-Zionist declaration from Germany…”)

The author takes great pains to defend Aaronsohn against his detractors. Repetitive excerpts from Aaronsohn’s letters complain about his perceived mistreatment and antagonism from others. There was fierce opposition to NILI from the Jewish community, but Katz would have us believe it was mostly from pettiness and jealousy, which did seem to be rife among these passionate ideologues. Katz largely elides broader issues however, especially the question of Jewish identity, which was of critical import during this time period. While he mentions (not until page 303) that Edwin Montague of the British Cabinet protested that Jews are not a nation, but a religion, Katz (himself clearly a strong Zionist) does not let readers know the basis or context of this roiling controversy.

The beginning of the 20th Century in Europe marked a strong movement toward racial thinking, and in particular, the racial status of Jews. If, in fact, they were deemed to be a separate racial category, it was only a small step to concluding they were not entitled to the same privileges and protections as other citizens. German Jews especially had been experiencing a mini “enlightenment” prior to the promulgation of racist thought, and were loathe to jeopardize their newly acquired access to academia and politics. (See, e.g., Amos Elon’s "The Pity of It All.") According to Elon, because a lot of the Jewish intelligentsia wanted to emphasize that their loyalty was primarily as German citizens, they converted to Christianity (to no avail, as it happened), thus depriving much of mainstream Judaism of intellectual leadership. But their motivation was clear: they wanted to be thought of as fellow Germans, and did not desire to muddy the waters of acceptance by lending any credence to Zionist conspiracy theories.

Moreover, the Jews in Palestine who were minding their own business had every reason to fear repercussions from the Turks because of NILI’s activities. The infighting over cooperation versus resistance tragically presaged the internecine conflicts of the Judenrate in the next World War. It would have been useful for Katz to address these ongoing concerns of a group subject to persecution and reprisal, instead of treating the matter as one merely of local, sui generis squabbling and greed.

Katz credits the efforts of Aaronsohn and NILI with helping to prevent further abuse of the Jews by the Turks. Aaronsohn and his group assisted the British a great deal, but I think larger forces determined what the Turks did or did not do. The heroic efforts of Jan Karski and Szmul Zygielbojm to bring the Holocaust to the attention of the world in WWII stopped nothing. Even Churchill wanted to help the Jews, but Roosevelt, now the great power, did not want to alienate Stalin. There are many strategic complexities in the international arena, but Katz keeps us tied to the ground in the Levant with Aaronsohn and other early Zionists. I wish he had given us more context, and less minutiae.

Katz relates some fascinating anecdotes: the British reluctance to attack the Turks by sea in spite of the clear advantages over a land attack in Gaza – for the British, it was all too reminiscent of Gallipoli; the need to lay water pipelines before any attack (to paraphrase historian Michael B. Oren on the Middle East, it’s always about the water!); Aaronsohn’s valuable contributions on the geology and water sources in the Beersheba-Gaza zone and hydrography of the coastal plain (information that the British had no access to prior to Aaronsohn); and Aaronsohn’s trenchant insights into other players in The Great Game. (On T.E. Lawrence, for example, Aaronsohn wrote, “Has a high opinion of himself. He gives me a lesson on our settlements, on the spirit of the people … etc. Listening to his words I had the feeling that I was present at a lecture by a Prussian scientific anti-Semite who expressed himself in the English language.”)

Was this a good story? Yes. It needs context, tighter structure, and a more dispassionate presentation. I would recommend it for those who are already familiar with the issues and are interested in knowing the very small details of how a local spy organization might work, and/or those interested in the details of early Zionism.

The Aaronsohn Saga concerns the life of Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jew from the early 20th century. Apparently, he was a botanist of some repute; he discovered "wild wheat", which seems to be something of great importance. But more importantly, during World War I, he organized a spy ring called Nili, which gathered information on the Ottoman Empire and supplied it to the British. This information has been credited with successfully easing General Allenby's invasion of Palestine, as he knew the exact disposition, arrangement, and strength of the Turkish forces.

The whole spy thing was quite fascinating to me. Before reading the book, I had assumed Aaronsohn carried out this spying because he believed in the British cause. This is sort of true-- his sister Sarah, who ran Nili whenever he was out of the country (which was quite frequently) once witnessed the massacre of a group of Armenians at the hands of the Turks and feared that such a fate could befall her own people-- but it was also very much politically motivated. Aaronsohn, an ardent Zionist, believe that a British-dominated Palestine had a higher chance of leading to a Zionist state than a Turkish one, especially if the British authorities were in some sort of debt to the Jews.

Aaronsohn, an accomplished botanist, agronomist, and geologist with no formal training in any of those fields, was in charge of an agricultural station at Athlit. When locusts infested Palestine, he was the closest thing the Ottoman had to an expert on the subject, and he and his people were granted unlimited access to the country to help clear them out-- including military camps. So as they rid the country of locusts, his people quietly gathered all the information they could. Aaronsohn later traveled to America, ostensibly to work on a new food source for the Turkish government, but in actuality to make sure he was arrested in Scotland on the way so that he could make contact with British authorities (including Mark Sykes of Sykes-Picot fame) and established a line of communication. How he pulled this off is probably my favorite incident in the book.

Reviewing a biography is a bit strange for me-- I can't exactly talk about the plot or the characters, can I? Aaronsohn's story and that of Nili is certainly interesting, fascinating, and at times even heartbreaking (I think it would make a fabulous movie), and Katz does a good job of telling it. It certainly covers a topic of which I had very little knowledge beforehand, but knew I would like learning more about, and I did.

Mostly, what I have to pull out are quibbles-- there are a few aspects I found very strange. It opens up with a chapter that occurs relatively late in Aaronsohn's life, his initial contacting of the British authorities. I know that biographies generally need to open with a hook better than a person's birth, but this is followed up with a second out-of-sequence chapter that occurs somewhat earlier in his life, early in his agricultural career, when he discovers wild wheat and visits the United States. Oddly, the events of this chapter are never directly alluded to when their positions are reached in the main narrative. I know I probably could have compared dates if I had really wanted to, but I felt this could have been handled better with just a smidgen of extra work.

More glaring was the fact that some seemingly-important events went unexplained, or were relegated to footnotes. Two of Aaron Aaronsohn's brothers are first mentioned in a footnote! The text mentions one in passing, and a footnote on his name informs you that he was born last, and gives you the name of the two brothers to fall between Aaron and him. His sisters, Sarah and Rivka, seems to live with him, but this is never really explained, as his parents were alive at the time. I think they lived with him-- they are always referred to as helping him, even when they were young and he had moved away from home.

Most strangely, his mother is killed in a footnote! If there was a reference to her death in the main body of the text when it happened, I missed it entirely. In a section of the narrative talking about the farming town of Hadera, there is a footnote explaining that conditions there for early Zionist pioneers were rough and that they paid the price: "Aaron's mother Malka, barely sixty years old, died in 1912" (76). At that point, the main narrative had reached 1915, and that was the first I'd heard of her passing! I'd've thought the death of his mother would have had some impact on him.

Another oddity can be seen in those dates-- Aaronsohn died in 1919, and the book has already reach 1915 on page 76 of a 330-page book. This is because his early career is covered somewhat skimpily at times, with us being told that he worked one job for several years, and another for a couple more, cheerfully rolling over vast spans of time in a couple paragraphs (38). Maybe nothing of interest did indeed happen during this time, but I found it rather odd. Especially as Katz says in the introduction that "Aaronsohn's early career, with its amazing achievements in the world of science, was surely important enough for a biography" (1).

Conversely, the story of Nili is covered in painstaking detail, so much that Aaron Aaronsohn actually disappears from the narrative for about five chapters at a point where he is in London and the text does not follow him there until some time later. I can certainly understand Katz's reasoning in doing this-- those chapters are some of the most involving in the book, as they concern the discovery of Nili by the Turks and its destruction-- but make a book ostensibly about Aaron Aaronsohn feel oddly unfocused.

Actually, Katz says in the introduction that the book is called The Aaronsohn Saga and not Aaron Aaronsohn: A Biography because "It is impossible to see and write of Sarah only as a lesser player--as Aaron's deupty.... Sarah was a great historic personality in her own right" (1). But aside from the sections on Nili, Sarah is not much more developed than many other figures in Aaron's life, which makes the title and this claim feel like a concession to the fact that Katz's story of Aaron Aaronsohn just meandered a bit.

But I would not lose out on those chapters for anything-- the disintegration of Nili is gripping reading, obviously researched and covered in a meticulous level of detail, and the eventual fates of Aaron's father and his sister Sarah are compelling-- and tragic. I just wish Katz knew whether he was writing an Aaron Aaronsohn book or a Nili book. Somewhat less interesting or relevant, however, is a chapter describing how an Israeli police officer in the 1960s discovered the long-disputed ultimate fates of two members of Nili.

My other quibble would be the book's heavy Zionist streak. It is understandable in that Aaron Aaronsohn was (obviously) a Zionist and that the author is (more obviously) one as well, but aggravating in that any Jew who was not a Zionist-- or indeed, did not agree with Aaronsohn's brand of Zionism-- feels somewhat vilified. (For example, one is referred to as Aaronsohn's "lifelong enemy" in a photo caption, but when I thought about what that man actually did, it comes across as a tremendous oversimplification for someone who was doing what he thought was right every bit as much as Aaronsohn was.)

Don't let this list of problems fool you, however. Though the book is rough around the edges, it is competently written on the whole, and the tale of Aaron Aaronsohn, an obviously brilliant and passionate man, is fascinating and makes for excellent reading. Would that more people knew about him and his contributions to World War I.

All that said, I have no idea what that bird is doing on the cover.

The Aaronsohn Saga by Shmuel (Samuel) Katz. is a very complex story of the espionage work done for the British Army in their fight against the Turks, in the Palestine of World War One.

Aaron, Alexander, and Sarah Aaronsohn and their comrades were heroes in the establishment of pro-British espionage in a time when many leaders including Ben-Gurion were pro-Turkish.

Aaronsohn, a botanist, discovered a weather resistant variety of wheat in the Galillee called Wild Emmer Wheat. He established an experimental station in 1910 in Atlit, Palestine through the efforts of sympathetic Americans such as Judge Brandeis, and Henrietta Szold. He succeeded in fighting a plague of locusts in 1915-16 which gave him prestige with the Turkish authorities.

The Aaronsohn family detested Turkish rule, when much Jewish owned property was seized. When hostilites began in the region, they established an organization called the Gideonites, to fight the Turks. They thought the British were more pro-Zionist.

In 1915, the British agreed to an espionage operation centered in Atlit. In 1916, Aron Aaronsohn put forth a plan to British intelligence about a detailed intelligence network between Palestinian Jews and the British. The organization was called NILI that translated means The Eternal One of Israel Shall Not Lie (Netzach Israel Lo Yeshaker). The name was chosen as a password.

His knowledge helped form the tactics used by Allenby to capture Beersheba and then Jerusalem October -December 1917. He showed Allenby where water was located underground, which made it unnecessary to transport it by rail from Egypt. Brigadier Gribbon credited Aaronsohn with saving 30,000 British lives.

Operations of NILI were directed by Sarah Aaronsohn and Joseph Lishansky. There were 21 active members and over a hundred working on Nili's behalf in the Turkish army, on road construction and on water supplies.

The Turks caught some carrier pigeons used by Nili, and thus discovered the network. After capture, a member of Nili, Na'aman Belkind, gave the Turks information that led to many NILI members being arrested. Virtually all NILI activists were captured and tortured. Sarah Aaronsohn took her own life after four days of torture.

Aaronsohn was a difficult person, and at odds with many of the leaders of the Zionist movement concerning the future borders of Jewish Palestine, relationship with arabs, and relationships with western governments.

He was present at the Paris Peace Conference , and played a role in the talks concerning the future of Palestine. When leaving London, and flying to Paris, the plane crashed and his body was never found. He was 43 years old.

The Aaronsohn home has been preserved as a national memorial and museum, but the contributions of the family, and of NILI have been given very little recognition. It is thought that disputes among the Zionists led to the omission of the Aaronsohn episodes from their view of history.

This history by Shmuel Katz should do a great deal to repair the omissions of history, and bring the Aaronsohn family the recognition they earned.

[
The Aaronsohn Saga] by Shmuel Katz (2007)
ISBN 9652294160
Gefen Publishing House (2007), Hardcover, 370 pages

I got this book through Librarything as a review copy. Pip and Jenny are reading about the 20th century for school this year, and I thought this biography of a little known but apparently remarkable figure involved in World War I might be something we could use for school.

It's a good book, and a great story, but we won't be using it for school. One reason is because we just can't squeeze another book in unless it's absolutely, stunningly, overwhelmingly remarkable. Really good and quite interesting isn't enough, and I am not sure this one qualifies as 'REALLY good.' The second reason, and also the reason it fails the 'REALLY good' test for me, is because it presupposes more knowledge than I (and probably the girls) have of all the issues and reasons behind things like, the Zionist movement, the push to make a homeland for the Jewish people long before World War I even began, the attempts to establish Israel in the Middle East as a British Protectorate, the antisemitism that ran through British society and the British military like a dirty, yellow streak of ring-around-the-collar, and the people and personalities involved in the British campaign in the Middle East . If you're as ill informed as I, you might do well to read some sort of 'WWI in the Middle East for Dummies' guidebook first, and then try this book.

So we've established that this is a book for a type of reader who is less of an ignoramus than I am on these matters. I realized I was in over my head on about page 11, where Katz refers in passing to the 'noted American George Post,' and all I could remember was that he probably was the Post behind Post cereals. Then there was the 'noted botanist-geologist-African explorer" I do not recognize and I'm not naming in order to preserve a shred of dignity, and 'Friedrich Koernicke himself' (who?), along with 'noted botanist Bornmuller.' I get the idea. I am lacking in any knowledge on the issues I am trying to read about. Neither was I quite clear on Baron Rothchild's support of the Jewish settlers in Palestine, and too many other things to mention.

It was probably only a petty sense of getting even that made me count the use of three 'howevers' within five sentences and think smugly, "Somebody needed a better editor." After all, Katz did not originally write this biography in English, so I am being a bit catty. Put it down to my frustration at not being able to understand and follow uncomfortably large chunks of what was and is obviously an incredible and interesting story of two fascinating and remarkable people.

Aaronsohn and his sister Sarah, the main subjects of this book, are, however, too majestic for me to continue being petty. I continued to struggle through material I didn't understand, war strategy I couldn't follow (I can't follow a football game, either, and for the same reason), and people and events I could, at best, just barely recognize by name as somebody I'd heard of in some remote historical connection, and I kept it up not just because I got this free copy on condition that I review it. They were interesting people in a tragic story, and I wanted to know what they did, why they did it, and what happened to them, even if I did have to read painstakingly through details I couldn't understand, references to events and personalities outside my frame of reference, and in a sometimes choppy, hard to follow translation.

Spoilers follow.

The Aaronsohns were Palestinian Jews, part of a farming family. Aaron himself was largely self-educated after 11, although he did have something like an apprentice-ship, and he later traveled to Europe to study with others. His sisters, who helped him with his work and were themselves quite knowledgeable and capable, were as near as I can discover, entirely home educated. He taught them how to care for his herbarium, what sort of records to keep, and how to observe scientifically. He was a botanist, an agricultural scientist, a man who knew much about geology, geography, and a man with an immense heart (and also an immense sense of pride and apparently a large enough temper to match the rest. We can't all be perfect). In 1909 he was offered the prestigious position of professor at the University of California at Berkeley to replace another world renowned person of whom I was woefully and shamefully ignorant- Professor Hilgard. He refused, because he wanted to pursue his dream of an experimental agricultural station in Palestine where work could be done on developing the dry-land farming methods that would make his homeland a thriving agricultural center.

Ahead of his time, he insisted (much to the dissatisfaction of many of his fellow Jews) on hiring Arab workers as well as Jews, pointing out that the allegedly 'unscientific' methods of Arab farmers were often the result of centuries of trial and area working under precisely the sort of difficult and somewhat unique conditions under which they themselves labored. Aaronsohn was not terribly diplomatic about just what he thought of the sort of shortsighted bigotry which would cripple the work of the experimental station, and both this attitude and this episode would come back to haunt him in the sort of frustrating stuff of tragedy that makes me ache with impotent pain when reading, say, Hamlet.

Moving on through our story at a much more rapid pace than Shmuel Katz was able to (because he, after all, was an informed, educated, and experienced author who knew his topic and was writing a book and I have neither information, education, or experience in his topic, and am only writing a stubby and ignorant book review), WWI happened, Turkey, which then controlled Palestine, came in on Germany's side. Aaron Aarohnson had already had some concerns about just how interested Turkey was in protecting her minorities, and the genocidal attempts by the liberal and progressive Young Turks government to exterminate the Armenian people convinced him that the only safety for Jewish Palestinians was to have their own nation. He determined to do what he could to support the British side, as he felt that a British Protectorate was the best option for an Israeli homeland (this, too, was a tragedy, as Britain failed, morally and tactically).

His sister Sarah had been living in Constantinople, but took a train home to be with her family at about this time- From her train window she was a horrified witness of the slaughter of Armenians by the Turkish military. She, too, feared that the fate of the Armenians was a precursor of what the Turkish government intended to do for the Jews.

Through a troublesome series of fits and starts, trail and error, and mismanaged communications by the British, Aaron finally managed to establish contact with the British government. He, Sarah, and several of their friends and co-workers at the agricultural station established a spy network designed to funnel useful information to the British Government. Aaron had to stay in Cairo and Sarah effectively headed the work of NILI, the spy agency, at the station. NILI, incidentally, was 'unique in its overt sympathy for the Armenian victims' of the Turkish government according to Yair Auron in The Banality of Indifference: Zionism & the Armenian Genocide. Largely, he says, it was ignored even by the Jewish community in Turkey, and their main concern was merely that this should not happen to them. NILI members actually spoke out, offered support where they could, and risked their own aims to criticize the British government for not doing enough to stop it.

The British, frustratingly, did not often put the information gathered by NILI to the best use, but it was Aaronsohn and Nili's information that made Allenby's successful surprise attack of Beersheba possible. Not only did Allenby have constant information about where the Turks were and what they were doing, he was able to avoid transporting water by rail, using Aaronsohn's vast knowledge of the terrain to supply the army with water from underground.

The end of NILI was the result of a tragic concatenation of an errant carrier pigeon, a stubborn deserter from the Turkish Army, an unhappily timed fever, community jealousies and betrayals, and a rare poor decision on Sarah's part. Knowing that her spy ring's secrecy had been breached, one of their members captured and tortured, she turned down an immediately available offer of help to escape, with sixty or so others of her choosing, by boat. She said she'd think about and the boat should return for her later.

This decision is agonizingly incomprehensible, as she well knew from her own experience that the boat was often delayed for weeks by bad weather and the need travel only when the moon wasn't full. The boat sailed without her, and within a few days the Turks had surrounded the area, rounded up NILI, and subjected many members of the community, including Sarah and her innocent aged father, to torture. After several days Sarah chose to end her own life rather than submit to further torture.

Aaron would not find out about this for weeks, and while he grieved bitterly, he continued his work towards an Israeli homeland, laboring without tire at the end of the war, meeting with others, serving on councils, until he, too, died in a tragic plane crash at sea, still in his thirties. Much of his work was forgotten, some of his contributions actually misrepresented, and one of NILI's martyrs had his name smeared for years by false accusations of murder by those who had betrayed him. In the last few years several attempts have been made to set the record straight and give Aaron, Sarah, and their NILI friends and co-workers the recognition and admiration they deserve. This book was an admirable attempt to educate others about this noble brother and sister and their devotion to their people, and indeed, humanity.


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