Shai AronCritiques

I really had a hard time connecting to this book. I am not sure if it was the style of writing or the fact that I really didn't feel any real connection to the characters. I began to read and had to put it down. On my second attempt I made it through but didn't feel any better for my effort.

This is the story of a young man, BenHazar, who is searching to understand who his Israeli father Jochanan Cohen really was and to confirm for himself whether his father's radical beliefs and shadowy behavior had far reaching consequences on his family, friends and country. The novel explores relationships in such a unique way by creating stories within stories. BenHazar explains that he is going on his journey looking for links in the chain of his father's life. His journey begins after his father is mysteriously killed in a house fire while he is in his study destroying most of his precious books and important political papers. The circumstances are suspicious and BenHazar travels to many places including England, Greece and Hong Kong to speak with many people who knew his father and can help him uncover his father's past. It is through his journey that we get to know his father Jochanan and that Ben discovers both his parents and learns more about himself. He visits his father's friends, his relatives as well as his mother who has been institutionalized for 16 years and who he has rarely seen.

The author, Aron Shai succeeds in keeping the reader interested in the main character's exploits. In the final pages of the book, we are not surprised to learn of the odd behavior of BenHazar and we accept the conclusion that his father was indeed murdered. It takes great skill to keep the reader interested while creating such a complex tale and Shai is a master at this literary endeavor. He weaves together political intrigue, human foibles and personal chaos to create a clever plot. What is most impressive is that the unbelievable becomes believable in this story.

If you enjoy meeting strong characters, learning about history during wartime, and are drawn to psychological thrillers you will like this book. The author is constructing a story where he challenges human behavior during wartime and concludes that "Between arrogance and humiliation there can never be peace. " The book ends on a postive note as the author further concludes that "this is a new tune and we're expecting things to change".

I highly recommend "BenHazar, Son to a Stranger" to those who are looking for a thought-provoking, suspensful novel that captivates the reader's imagination. After reading this book, I can say that the author, Aron Shai, understands father/son dynamics and writes with compassion and poignancy about relationships between men and women as well. Shai is an historian, well-versed in the areas mentioned in his novel and this not only lends credibility to the story but makes for fascinating background detail.

Don't miss this grpping story. It's an important book to read if you want to better understand human nature and the key relationships between father and son and mother and son. With an unusual viewpoint, the author relates every man's desire to make ammends with parents and to reach a state of peaceful accord. Does the main character succeed, you'll have to read it for yourself to find out. It's a book that's worth your time.

I enjoy reading about the British occupation of Israel before it was a state. So I thought this book sounded interesting, and overall it was good. There were a few passages that seemed a bit unnecessary but I still enjoyed the book. It was about a man finding out who his father was after his father died in a mysterious fire.

As noted in a line of text running along the top of the front cover, this self-described historical novel has a variety of settings in time and place: World War II, pre-1948 Jerusalem, Oxford, Greece (specifically Ioannina), Hong Kong, and the Yom Kippur War (October 1973). The book actually begins five years earlier, when 25-year-old Benhazar (which in Hebrew means "son to a stranger") Cohen tries to find out about the strange secret life of his father, Jochanan, who has recently died in a suspicious fire.

For many readers like me, this book suffers from the author's assumption of reader familiarity with Israeli history, as well as perhaps an awkward translation from the original Hebrew. Unfortunately, the story was not interesting enough to do what good historical fiction does for me, which is to inspire me to learn more about the historical setting (time and place). Three eras and four locations in only 204 pages didn't help. I did read a little about Ioannina and the aforementioned war, and I was intrigued by the use of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) in the dialogue.

I was not inspired, however, to read more about the complicated political situations and people that Jochanan was involved in with Japan, Israel, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, and Burma. The author is a professor of history and East Asian studies and apparently wanted to incorporate his interests in the book. A blurb on the back of the book says "Many of the events in this fascinating and suspenseful novel are based on actual historical events disclosed for the very first time," but it's not clear what those events are. The book might have benefitted from an afterword. BenHazar makes an rambling political speech at his wedding, and that and the epilogue are apparently the author's theories about reaching peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The most interesting part of the book was the chapter about Jochanan's sister Sarina and her family hiding from the Nazis in Ioannina during World War II, apparently aided by a German soldier named Hans who was in love with Sarina. She is the most interesting character in the book. BenHazar's mother Irena is mildly intriguing, but like many other characters in the book, she is a caricature, confined to a mental institution for unexplained reasons. Another character's disappearance is supposed to be significant, but it's never explained why.

This book was confusing and rather boring, and I can't recommend it. Thank goodness it was a quick read. I give it one-half star for the parts on Sarina and Ioannina.½

This novel suffers a bad case of description not matching the final work. Billed as a suspenseful historical mystery, BenHazar ends up being none of those things. Suspense requires tight narrative control and a means for the reader to become invested in the outcome of events. A mystery requires a pattern of investigation, and a narrative tying-together of the "clues" or facts known. And only two chapters really get into the meat of being historical - the rest reads more like name dropping.

Post-modern in format, what the narrative actually does is follow Benhazar as he stumbles through cognitive fog, trying to piece together the life events of a largely-allegorical father, and succeeds via means totally outside the reading experience. Benhazar is the only actual character, all others are mere shadows, plot devices, or audience members whose presence reflects the reactions and meaning that Benhazar seems to seek for himself. It reads as all about him, his entitlement, his quest (which is never actually defined - there is no consistent motivational drive behind events), by the time the big revelations came, I didn't care anymore because the means of getting to them was so nonsensical that I couldn't trust the validity of anything.

Reading this, I thought that the artistry of the work would be far more effective as an art-house play, with Benhazar sitting on a spot-lit chair at center stage, thinking, only to occasionally spring to his feet shouting at the audience, with all the other characters coming as disembodied voices from the dark.

Edited to Add: Ah, I realized that I forgot Aunt Sarina and her story. Those chapters were dynamic and interesting, with character motivation, more than one emotion going on at a time, well plotted, and so totally at odds with the style of the rest of the work that my brain attributed them to something else I was reading entirely.

I found this book hard to read. Initially I was intrigued buy what happend to the father of the main character, but as I continued to read, I became confused by the jumping "back and forth" in time, and the lack of character development. In the end I did not care what happened to the father or Benhazar, the main character. There are too many loose ends.
The back cover of this book states "...Many of the events in the ...novel are based on actual historical events disclosed for the very first time"
Really? Which events? I could not tell fact from fiction in this book. My initial curiosity was worn down by the goal trying to determine what was fact and what was fiction. The author (or publishing house) should add an addendum to identify "...historical events" that were disclosed in this book. I also wonder if some of the unusual sentance structure is due to poor translation.

This book promises much, but falls short of delivering it. The story was often confusing. Often it was hard to tell where the story was taking place. The transitions between past and present were very blurry and most of the characters lacked development. The story is more like a rough draft, full of potential but not a finished product.

Benhazar's aunt, Sarina, is the most interesting character in the book. She is the most interesting character because she is the most developed character in the book. I found the budding puberty scene between Sarina and her daughter to be rather disturbing, though. It is not true to character nor is it realistic.

I found the historical references very interesting. I didn't know that there was an anti-British underground movement among the Jews in Palestine.

I was very disappointed. I feel that if the author had sent this work out to a select few knowledgeable readers and then done the work of rewriting and rewriting until it was "right," this would have been one fantastic book. This book is a good example to me of why a writer needs to be patient enough to go through the sometimes agonizing steps of revision.

This book was not an enjoyable read it was often hard to follow and it was a struggle to stay interested enough to finish the book. The book covers two periods, from World War II to the establishment of the State of Israel, following the lives of two men – a father, Jochanan, and his son, Benhazar. When Jochanan dies in a mysterious fire that burned all of his records, Benhazar begins a search to understand his father, and in the process discovers himself and learns some undisclosed bizarre history about his country Israel. Benhazar learns that his father was a man with a shadowy past, a possible underground radical who may have worked for Lechi, a clandestine and militant anti-British Jewish group in Palestine during the years prior to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. Benhazar tries to find out if he was murdered, and if he was, was it by fellow Israelis or by British?

I wanted to like this book. It starts with an interesting premise: Benhazar Cohen's father, who was involved with the underground Jewish groups that fought the British to get control of Palestine, dies in a mysterious fire that destroys most of his papers, and Benhazar becomes determined to find out the truth about his father's past. This is all set against the background of Israel in the years between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, with a detour to Greece under Nazi occupation. Unfortunately, this book suffers from many problems and ultimately fails as fiction.

One of the problems is bad writing. People spout dialogue that no real person would ever say, e.g., "The Oriental tunes blaring from [the radio] swept me up into a colorful, sensuous world, as bright as the shirts of the young men accompanying the singer who seemed to be hidden inside the radio." Worse is the characterization of the protagonist. As a rule, when you see the phrase "for some reason" or "I didn't know why" preceding a character's action, it is a very bad sign: it means the character is about to do something that makes no sense, and the author doesn't have the sense himself to try glossing over it, instead emphasizing the irrationality of the action (some writer's workshops call this "jumping up and down on thin ice"; TV Tropes calls it "hanging a lampshade on it"). Well, those phrases or variants thereof recur throughout the novel. The problem is that Benhazar is constantly doing things, not for reasons that make sense for his character, but because the author needs him to, and Aron Shai cannot resolve the conflict. There are also oddities like Benhazar's occasional swoons or fits, which are never properly dealt with or explained.

The plot is also a mishmash, jumping around in time and place (as memories strike Benhazar when it is convenient for the author to recount them). There is no real resolution: Benhazar learns many things about his father, but nothing that seems truly revelatory. Near the end of the book Benhazar develops the conviction that you must allow your enemy honor and dignity before you can make peace — not a bad message, if it's intended to be the point of the book, but it is introduced too late and too abruptly.

There are two third-person chapters about Benhazar's aunt, Sarina, one of which recounts her experiences in a Jewish town in Greece before WWII and under Nazi occupation. This is the best part of the book: tense, well-written, involving. However, Shai has endowed Sarina with some sort of magical charisma that makes men fall in love with her instantly, including a Nazi officer who (slight spoiler) saves the life of her family apparently because of an inexplicable, inexorable attraction to her, though he never gets to speak to her or see her. She seems to return the affection, demonstrating more than just gratitude. This strand of the plot undermines the credibility of the whole episode.

The author is a historian, and it shows in his detailed descriptions of past times and places. He appears to be critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but his point, if this is it, comes out muddled because of the writing and structure of the book. And while I am not a historian, I have to object to his implication that Japan's pre-World War II military government was not really that bad (ask the residents of Nanjing about that, or anyone who was a POW in Japan). He also argues that Japan's occupation of much of Asia helped free the region from Western hegemony and led eventually to its independence. That may be so, but Japan was merely trying to replace Western hegemony with its own, and trotting out murderous dictators such as Suharto as eventual consequences of Japanese rule does not bolster Shai's argument.

In the end, this is simply a bad book. (The extra half star is for the Greek interlude.) Aron Shai may for all I know be a fine historian, but as a fiction writer he has an awful lot to learn.½

Although Benhazar, Son to a Stranger combines elements – historical fiction, mystery, family dynamics – that seem to have a lot of potential, the book falls flat and leaves this reader frustrated. Its author, Aron Shai, does not seek to make a fairly esoteric subject – Israeli history – accessible to non-Israeli readers, assuming a previous knowledge of the subject that is almost certainly overblown. In addition to the novel’s confusing back story, Shai’s plot is disjointed and abrupt with important twists given so little emphasis that they are at times missed or misinterpreted. In addition, his characters’ motivations, histories, and relationships are so shallowly described, if they are described at all, that this reader felt almost no empathy for them or interest in following them to the end of the book, though I did, regrettably. The only redeeming elements of the story are those where the author describes the life of the narrator’s aunt, Sarina. Perhaps, he should stick to narrating in the third person, for these sections were the only parts in the book that felt coherent and comprehensive.

This is an odd cookie of a book: it's part history, part mystery, part political proclamation, part love story, with a loose string to hold it together, almost like the author made a list of things he wanted to "have said" and then tried to weave a story around it. Some parts are absolutely riveting, like the story about Salonika, which I would happily have read a whole book about. Others are written like plain history (the author is a historian, and it shows) and those parts were potentially interesting, but I would rather they would have been in a book of their own. The literary part, BenHazar's search for his father's past, is interesting in that it seems almost predestined that his own child will be the son of a stranger too, but I'm not entirely sure what, if anything, this is adding to the tale. In essence, this should have been several different books or a chunkster of 600+ pages - as it is, it's a bit of a muddle that doesn't quite manage to capture the reader, other than in small chunks.

After his father dies in a mysterious fire in Jerusalem, BenHazar decides to learn more about his father's history. The historical novel is based on many actual events and spans from pre-WWII Jeruslaem, to Greece, to Hong Kong.

It was a fasinating look at a man discovering himself in discovering the story of his father's life. Some passages were a little dull, but overall I really enjoyed it.

I found this a challenging read, because the author slipped around in time without a lot of cues that he was changing. The narrative also shifted points of view, and seemed to shift focus entirely over the course of the book, from the recently-dead father to the son. It never felt like the father was understood enough, that the son's investigations came to any kind of conclusion, which would be perhaps acceptable were this memoir, but this was billed as fiction, which has different structures. And the politics were oddly detailed compared to the rest of the book, which glossed things over in many places. It frustrated me, because I wanted to like this more than I did.