The Road to Ein Harod

In this slim, rhetoric-suffused novel, Israeli journalist and peace activist Kenan portrays a fascist Israel in the wake of a military coup. A Jewish opponent of the regime must unite, however uneasily, with an Arab pariah to evade the army patrols and find his way to the last bastion of resistance, Ein Haroda legendary kibbutz founded by socialist Zionists who dreamed of peaceful coexistence with their Arab neighbors. Although the cautionary Orwellian tale makes some trenchant points about ideological betrayal and Kenan evinces a familiarity with military strategy, Israel's terrain and the trajectory of Jewish history, much here is overt allegory. The work is marred by an inadequate, graceless translation (from the Hebrew via the French version) and the prose, frequently boasting gratuitous scatological language, resorts to repetitious double-talk: ``Don't you see?,'' says a general, ``Whoever wants to stop what is happening today from happening today has to find a way to stop what happened yesterday from happening yesterday and what happened the day before from happening the day before. Only he who can stop today what happened the day before yesterday can also stop what will happen tomorrow because of what's happening today, if you see what I mean.'' (September)