Author Jonathan Wilson to discuss new work

By Susie Davidson

A despondent London painter and his wife accidentally happen upon the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew in Palestinian territory. This sad occurrence could have happened this month, but in Jonathan Wilson’s new novel, the scene is British-ruled 1920s Palestine.

Wilson, who is Chair of the English Department at Tufts University and the school’s Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, will discuss “A Palestine Affair” on Thursday, Sept. 18 at 7:30 p.m., with a subsequent book signing provided by New England Mobile Book Fair.

The book takes the reader upon a winding and oblique saga involving several characters who have traveled to the region to escape the grief of the first World War. Painter Mark Bloomberg, and his American wife Joyce, who have come to the region to take up a propaganda commission, are caught up in the investigation of the murder, which is initially and quickly pinned on an Arab boy. Their philosophies and their marriage itself go through the wringer as Joyce is drawn both into an affair with the British investigator and a shadowy form of Zionism. Passion, politics and the beauty of the desert life are highlighted as ultimately, their beliefs and their emotions are weighed and weathered in the face of a strange and nascent culture.

Wilson became interested in the setting of his new work due to both interest and foreknowledge.

“I had set my first novel “The Hiding Room” in the Jerusalem and Cairo of 1941, and I wanted to go a little deeper into the past,” he said. “I fixed on Jerusalem in 1924 because an actual murder which I knew about had taken place then, and also because the Anglo-Jewish painter David Bomberg, on whom I somewhat based my character Mark Bloomberg, was out there then.” Wilson has been interested in Bomberg for some time; his brother owns two of his paintings. “He bought them very cheaply before Bomberg’s reputation was restored in the last fifteen years,” he said. “Also, after the Rabin assassination, when people started to talk about the singularity of the event, I wanted to turn to early precedents,” he added. “I wanted to remind readers that the past has sometimes been darker than we would wish it to be.”

Wilson, a Newton resident who attended the University of Essex, St. Catherine's College in Oxford, Columbia University in New York (as a visiting scholar) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, grew up in an observant Orthodox family in northwest London’s Dollis Hill neighborhood. His father, Lewis Wilson, served as Company Secretary of the United Synagogues of Great Britain. “I wasn't allowed to ride my bike or play with a soccer ball on Shabbat,” he recalled. A US resident since 1976, Wilson lived and taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1977 to 1981. “A great deal of my writing, both fiction and non-fiction, comes out of my Jewish experience and interest,” he said. He describes himself as “an old-fashioned secular cultural Jew.”

The author of two critical works on the novels of Saul Bellow, two books of short stories (the newest, “An Ambulance is on the Way,” will be published by Pantheon in 2004), as well as two works of fiction, “The Hiding Room” and “Schoom” (sic), he often writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Times Literary Supplement and The Forward, among other media.

For further information, please call the Library at 617-796- 1360.

Wilson has written six books, two works of criticism, two novels, and two books of short stories. The second book of short stories

Newton resident and author Jonathan Wilson (Jewish) will speak on his dramatic novel of passion and politics, of simmering tensions and spectacular beauty in British-ruled Palestine of the 1920s. This talk on A Palestine Affair at the Newton Free Library will take place on Thursday, September 18, 7:30PM, followed by a booksigning with books provided by New England Mobile Book Fair.

Beth Purcell 617-796-1410

Beth Purcell" <bpurcell@CI.NEWTON.MA.US> |

JMW44@aol.com