Customer Reviews

Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment (Danube Edition)

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Anyone with any interest in the Middle East should read this book. A political novel that hasn't lost any of its punch by being a bit dated, it's engrossing in its characters, its plot, and its description of the political conflict in pre-world war II Palestine. Too bad Koestler isn't with us today to explain how things got from where they were in 1940 to where they are now. Also too bad that a jem like this is out of print when so much that's pushed by the massive marketing machines of the few surviving publishing houses constitutes so much donkey dung.

Koestler one of the great polymath intellectuals of the twentieth - century, most famous for his novel, 'Darkness at Noon' writes here a story of Jewish settlers in the Galilee in the late thirties. Many of them are refugees from increasingly Nazi- dominated Europe, carrying with them scars of that experience. The hero Joseph, the son of a Jewish father and a British mother came to his Jewishness late - in- life through an anti- Semitic incident. The novel has two other important collectives as central operatives in the action. One is the Arab villagers who have sold the hilltop- land to the Jews but then violently oppose its settlement. The second is the British bureaucrats who run the Mandate and maneuver between the Arabs and Jews.
Koestler writes in his own tough way fairly and somewhat sympathetically about all the groups. He sees their positions from inside. He is especially good at seeing the internal Jewish divisions , and how they too involve seeing the Arab side. In some of these descriptions I felt Koestler could be writing about the very same situation that persists today.
One problem of the work is the very harshness of tone and toughness which makes it difficult to have great sympathy with any of the characters. One feels as if the author is himself so conflicted towards them that he cannot show great feeling for them.
The great strength of the book , I believe , comes from Koestler's skill and power as a journalist. His descriptions of the people and the land, the situations of conflict are precise and believable . There is a certain dramatic power in the novel, and it does have suspense. The reader truly wants to know where it is going, how it will turn out.
In the end though showing the conflict from all sides one feels Koestler does make a convincing case for the pioneering Jewish society.
This is not a great work, but it is a highly readable still, more than half a century after it was first published in 1946.

This is a fascinating book which shows brilliant insight to the human soul and nature. It was a real pleasure to read.

This book tells of life and conflict in pre-World War II Palestine, at time when the Jews were undergoing murderous persecution in Europe by the Nazis, when Britain was blocking Jews from entering Palestine, and when Arab terror was being stepped up in the Holy Land, incited and actively aided by the British.
The book depicts all of these things, as well as life on a Kibbutz and it's complicated and interesting people there.
It depicts well the interactions of the players, life on a kibbutz, life in the Holy Land, and insights into psychology, Zionism, socialism, war and peace, life and death and sexuality.
A very good novel by a dislikeable and disturbed man.