Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The English Teacher
WORK NOTES: trans by Philip Simpson
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1949
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Israeli
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2142380/yiftach-reicher-atir
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1949.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and novelist.
MIILITARY:Israel Defense Forces, retired with the rank of Brigadier General.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Yiftach Reicher Atir is a former brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces. He took part in both military and intelligence operations, including Operation Entebbe, a counter-terrorist mission that rescued hostages held on an aiplane at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda on July 4, 1976. After retiring from the military, Atir turned his attention to writing novels. In his novel titled The English Teacher, Atir provides a fictionalized account of a true spy story. Writing in an introductory note to the book Atir remarks: “The book you are holding in your hands is the true story of what never happened.” Atir also notes that the Israeli spy agency Mossad made “numerous changes and omissions” to the novel prior to publication. Writing for the Jewish Books Council Web site, Barbara M. Bibel noted: “The Mossad vetted and censored the book before publication, but the loneliness and constant anxiety of undercover operatives is apparent as the story unfolds.”
Rachel Goldschmitt is a Mossad agent who spied for Israel while working for several years in a Muslim nation before being stationed in Israel. After taking leave to attend her father’s funeral in London, England, and to settle his affairs, Rachel disappears but not before taking all the money out of her bank account. What prompted Rachel’s disappearance was the discovery of letters from her former handler at Mossad, Ehud, revealing to her father that Rachel worked for Mossad. Rachel is outraged because she was never allowed to tell her father about her work. Rachel thinks, if she had been allowed to reveal that information, she might have formed a good relationship with her father, something they did not have when she left home at a young age.
Rachel has long been a mysterious figure, even to the now retired Ehud, who receives a disturbing and cryptic call from Rachel shortly before her disappearance. Despite his retirement, Ehud, who is a widower and still is in love with Rachel, receives a summons from the agency, who wants him to help track down Rachel, who has knowledge about Mossad and its operations that could threaten Israel’s safety. Ehud teams up with his former handler, Joe, who is also retired, to hunt for Rachel. As Ehud and Joe conduct their search, readers soon learn more about Rachel as Ehud recounts her story to Joe. In the meantime, readers also learn that Mossad agents sometimes face ethical dilemmas that challenges morality. “Atir is straightforward and sometimes graphic in his depictions of Mossad assassinations,” wrote Washginton Post Online contributor Richard Lipez.
Meanwhile, as the search goes on, Ehud realizes more and more how little he really did not know about Rachel, including the fact that she was in love with a Muslim man. As the story unfolds, Ehud learns about Rachel’s love for Rashid, who came from a family that ran a chemical business. While she worked undercover in the Moslem country, Rachel gathered much information via her relationship with Rashid about a biological weapons program. Ehud begins to think that perhaps Rachel has disappeared in order to reunite with Rashid, who she left years ago after her cover as a spy looked like it was going to be revealed. Meanwhile, Ehud understands that he is under serious pressure from the agency to find her, partly because they know about his feelings for Rachel and believe that he was not as diligent as he could have been when handling her. The pressure is that much greater because he and Joe have orders to to capture Rachel no matter what, even if they have to kill Ehud’s former charge. The story is told via Ehud’s point of view as well as Rachel’s as she is on missions, including one in which uses a poisoned glove to kill a flirtatious German scientist.
“The details of a covert operative’s life and methods are certainly fascinating,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who went on to note: “Atir appreciates subtle spycraft and knows his business.” Thomas Gaughan, writing for Booklist, remarked: The English Teacher “will also appeal to any reader looking for insightful writing about the human condition.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2016, Thomas Gaughan, review of The English Teacher, p. 35.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2016, review of The English Teacher.
ONLINE
Deborah Harris Agency Web site, http://www.thedeborahharrisagency.com/ (February 16, 2017), author profile.
Jewish Book Council web site, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (February 16, 2017), Barbara M. Bibel, review of The English Teacher.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (February 16, 2017), Jen Forbus, review of The English Teacher.
Times of Israel Online, http://www.timesofisrael.com/ (March 19, 2014),Mitch Ginsburg, “A True Mossad Spy Story that Didn’t Really Happen,” review of The English Teacher.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (August 25, 2016), Philip K. Jason, review of The English Teacher.
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (August 15, 2016), Richard Lipez, “A Spy Tale so Real that Israel Censored It: The English Teacher by Yiftach Atir.*
Yiftach Reicher Atir was born in 1949 on Kibbutz elf
oval, in the south of Israel. As a young commando officer, he participated in Operation Entebbe and other military and intelligence operations before retirement with the rank of Brigadier General (Intelligence). The English Teacher is his third novel.
Yiftach Reicher-Atir was born in 1949 on Kibbutz Shoval, in the south of Israel. As a young commando officer, he participated in Operation Entebbe and other military and intelligence operations before retiring with the rank of Brigadier General (Intelligence). Reicher-Atir is the author of three novels, the latest of which, THE ENGLISH TEACHER, has been acclaimed by readers and critics alike.
LC control no.: no2007092554
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PJ5055.39.E42
Personal name heading:
Reicher Atir, Yiftach
Variant(s): Atir, Yiftach Reicher
Raikher ʻAtir, Yiftaḥ
Reicher-Atir, Yiphtach
Atir, Yiftach R.
ריכר-עתיר, יפתח
Special note: Machine-derived non-Latin script reference project.
Non-Latin script reference not evaluated.
Found in: ʻIsḳat ḥavilah, c2007: t.p. (Yiftaḥ Raikher ʻAtir)
t.p. verso (Yiftach Reicher Atir [in rom.]) cover
(Yiftaḥ Raikher-ʻAtir)
Sheḳiʻah kefulah, c2012: t.p. (Yiftaḥ Raikher-ʻAtir)
t.p. verso (Yiphtach Reicher-Atir [in rom.])
The English teacher, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Yiftah R. Atir [in
rom.]) data view (b. in 1949 on a kibbutz in the south
of Israel; as a young military officer, he participated
in Operation Entebbe--the hostage-rescue operation
carried out by commandos of the Israel Defense Forces at
Entebbe airport, Uganda, on July 4, 1976--and in other
still-classified military and intelligence operations;
he retired from the military in 1995, with the rank of
Brigadier General; Atir is the author of four novels;
his third, The English Teacher--based on his firsthand
experience as an intelligence officer)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Atir, Yiftach R.: THE ENGLISH TEACHER
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Atir, Yiftach R. THE ENGLISH TEACHER Penguin (Adult Fiction) $16.00 8, 30 ISBN: 978-0-14-312918-9
An ex-Mossad agent sets off a scramble at the agency when she disappears.Rachel's father has died and she's traveled to London to settle his estate, but her thoughts are filled with melancholy for the relationship the two failed to cement before she left home. When she finds a box of letters from her former handler, Ehud, in which he explains to her father that Rachel is working for Mossad--a detail she was forbidden to share with him herself--she decides she's had enough and vanishes--but only after calling Ehud and leaving him with a cryptic message: "My father died....He died for the second time." Her disappearance sets off alarms in Israeli intelligence circles: although Rachel has been retired for some time, what she knows about Mossad's operations and key intelligence she developed could be ruinous. They need to find her and find her fast. Ehud and Joe, another retired agent, begin the search for the woman who is wanted "dead or alive," and, as they continue, Ehud, long in love with Rachel, tells Joe her story. The point of view switches back and forth between Rachel as she pursues her missions and Ehud, who narrates Rachel's story until this point. While the details of a covert operative's life and methods are certainly fascinating, Atir's style is not. Ehud and Rachel share the same voice, rendering the narrative strangely monotonous. It's not a bad voice, but it never varies, even when the stakes change from forbidden love to a risky maneuver involving biological weapons. Ultimately, Rachel's life comes across as sad, and she's painted as capable but damaged. Readers will have to work hard to care about her since there's little to justify Ehud's undying love. Atir appreciates subtle spycraft and knows his business, but this tale is often morose and features a woman who can be less likable than the people she seeks to best in her subterfuge.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Atir, Yiftach R.: THE ENGLISH TEACHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455212534&it=r&asid=461c28e51509e07b9ea301deefa2848a. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455212534
The English Teacher
Thomas Gaughan
Booklist. 112.21 (July 1, 2016): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The English Teacher. By Yiftach R. Atir. Tr. by Philip Simpson. Aug. 2016. 272p. Penguin, paper, $16 (9780143129189); e-book, $11.99 (9780143129196).
Only a few key people in Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, know of Rachel Goldschmitt, but she is one of Mossad's most effective spies. Fresh from training, Rachel was embedded in a Muslim nation for four years, teaching English there while uncovering secrets that helped keep Israel from harm. But even Ehud, once her case officer, realizes that all he really knows about Rachel is what she permitted him to see. Now long retired, a lonely widower still in love with Rachel, Ehud is shocked by a cryptic phone call from her. She then vanishes, and Ehud is called back to Mossad to help find her. Atir, a retired Israeli Defense Force general, makes his English-language debut with this nuanced, thoughtful, and powerfully plausible consideration of the emotional toll paid by lone "combatants" undercover in very hostile environs. The English Teacher is also a love story, portraying both Rachels love for a Muslim man and Ehuds never-spoken love for his agent. Espionage fans will find the tradecraft engaging, but this novel will also appeal to any reader looking for insightful writing about the human condition.--Thomas Gaughan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gaughan, Thomas. "The English Teacher." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 35. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459888968&it=r&asid=7d81cd5a11b13342a100be456191a310. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459888968
The English Teacher
by Yiftach Reicher Atir , trans. by Philip Simpson
When former Mossad agent Rachel Goldschmitt makes a mysterious call to Ehud, the man who served as her handler, he immediately contacts the clandestine Israeli organization and they go on full alert. Rachel has knowledge of vital secrets, and no one knows where she is or what her intentions are. She's an explosive liability and must be found, but Ehud has always harbored a secret love for Rachel. He's divided between loyalty to his country and affection for this woman. His goal is to ensure both are safe, but the Mossad leaders want only the potential threat neutralized. In Yiftach Reicher Atir's first work translated into English, the former Israeli Army Brigadier General of Intelligence tells the story of the female spy in a series of flashback episodes, as experienced by both Rachel and Ehud, while the Mossad desperately tries to locate its rogue former agent.
Based on actual events, The English Teacher is a slower-moving spy novel that focuses more acutely on psychological aspects than daring exploits and secret operations. Atir dissects the emotional and mental elements of his characters as they cope with their ambiguous identities. The compassionate depiction of individuals expected to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of their country is deeply moving, and exquisitely reflects the complexities--and commonalities--experienced broadly. The passions are not exclusive to a culture or religion; that universality in this meticulous translation makes The English Teacher both insightful and accessible, a welcome addition to the espionage genre. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts
The English Teacher
By Yiftach Reicher Atir; translated by Philip Simpson Penguin Books 272 pp.
Reviewed by Philip K. Jason
August 25, 2016
This psychological thriller probes the damaging uncertainties of life undercover.
Rachel Goldshmitt, Rachel Brooks, Rachel Ravid. Who is Rachel, exactly? Knowing she is a Mossad operative involved in a dangerous undercover assignment only begins to answer the question.
In this dark, interior tale, identity is scrutinized from several angles: identity hidden, identity adopted, identity lost. How does an operative playing out her cover story hold on to who she really is underneath? What does she have to sacrifice to be effective? And is she, herself, the sacrifice?
The English Teacher begins with the disappearance of this seasoned and exceptionally successful operative. Her former mentor and handler, Ehud, along with another senior Mossad operative, is assigned to determine what happened to her.
While Ehud cares deeply about this woman, whom he has known and secretly loved for a long time, it is not caring alone that motivates him. A stray agent is a danger to the Mossad and to Israeli security. She knows too much. How could this person, who as a young woman immigrated to Israel and whose Zionist passion made her a fairly easy recruit, simply disappear?
Much of the novel follows the investigation conducted by Ehud and his associate, Joe. Their dialogue is a rich blend of their personal and professional lives. For Ehud, his future is at stake. While the two men have a high degree of trust and shared understanding of the spy business, there is a game going on in which Joe has the upper hand.
Another dimension of the novel follows Ehud’s interior life at various times in his life and in his relationship with Rachel. And yet another segment, by far the most provocative, though dependent on insights afforded by the other characters, follows Rachel: her challenges, her loneliness, her search for a way of holding on to a centered self among the variable selves she dons for her country.
Rachel, whose cover is as a Canadian citizen raised in England, enters an Arab city (probably left unidentified due to Israeli censorship) and finds work at a school specializing in teaching English. She had already developed this skill while living in the Israeli town of Rehovot.
Breaking every rule, but perhaps still with a spy’s intent, she allows herself an affair with an Arab man named Rashid. In his company, she can visit places at which she might otherwise seem out of place.
Author Reicher Atir handles the growth of their passionate love within the context of Rachel’s duplicity with astounding skill. Who can a liar trust? The narrator observes that, “You even look at people differently, listen to them in another way, assessing every word and inflection. This is the punishment of the liar — the one who lies habitually can’t trust anyone.”
Rachel’s missions include obtaining important information, taking photographs, performing an assassination, and blowing up an enemy facility. Her terror is the fear of error, the fear of discovery, and the fear of not being able to control herself — to stay fully in her role without ever striking others as role-playing.
She becomes a Mossad superstar, but of course private celebrity affords little satisfaction. No one outside the Mossad can know.
Reicher Atir, who served in Israeli intelligence, raises important issues in this remarkably revealing novel. At one point, Ehud says, “There’s something intoxicating in our work; suddenly it’s permissible to lie, you can put on an act, and everything is sanctioned by the state. The operative is licensed to commit crimes. He steals, sometimes he even kills, and instead of going to prison he gets a commendation.”
The justifications for asking people to accept this inverted morality are at hand (saving the lives of others, etc.), but readers are left to wonder about the costs to the operative. Essentially, secret agents are on their own. They have no recourse to justice if captured, no expectation of assistance if things go wrong. They are expendable.
Ehud’s search for Rachel is simultaneously a search for himself. The end of the search is a chilling surprise, a fitting resolution to the many questions the novel explores, not only about these haunted characters, but also about the nations and institutions that train, employ, and brutalize such brutal operatives.
Philip K. Jason is professor emeritus of English at the United States Naval Academy. A former editor of Poet Lore magazine, he is the author or editor of 20 books, including Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture and Don’t Wave Goodbye: The Children’s Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom. His reviews appear in a wide variety of regional and national publications.
A spy tale so real that Israel censored it: ‘The English Teacher’ by Yiftach Atir
By Richard Lipez August 15, 2016
“The English Teacher” is the story of a Mossad operative written by a former Israeli intelligence officer. It’s not an autobiography but rather a thriller, based loosely on facts, or as its author, Yiftach Reicher Atir, writes in his introductory note, “a true story, of real life operatives that are wholly made up, and actual missions that never happened.”
Atir provides an astonishing look at Middle Eastern spycraft. He alerts readers that “numerous changes and omissions were imposed” by his government’s censors. Because a lot of what got into the novel seems plenty revealing and is often hair-raising, one is left wondering what shockers were left out. Also, how much of what Atir (who participated in the 1976 hostage-rescue operation in Entebbe, Uganda) put into the book is actually disinformation meant to throw other Middle Eastern intelligence agencies off track about how the Mossad spy agency actually operates? These are legitimate, intriguing questions that only add to the novel’s overall mysteriousness and to the many pleasures it offers
The book begins with a startling moment: Operative Rachel Ravid — once Rachel Goldschmitt, sometimes Rachel Brooks — is preparing to vanish.
We see her closing up the apartment of her recently deceased father and basking in the freedom his death has finally provided her. Instead of returning to Tel Aviv and her job in biological weapons research, the 41-year-old is headed elsewhere in the Middle East, and she’s not telling anybody where. Impulsively, it seems — though is the act really calculated? — Rachel phones her old case officer, Ehud, now retired from the Mossad, and tells him: “My father died. He died for the second time,” before abruptly hanging up.
[Best summer thrillers and mysteries of 2016]
Near-panic breaks out in the Israeli intelligence establishment. Falsely announcing the death of her father 15 years earlier was code for Rachel’s fleeing the unnamed Arab country where she had worked as an English teacher for six years while gathering information on that country’s biological weapons program. Most of the invaluable data she had stolen came from her lover, a sweet, hapless man named Rashid, whose family ran a chemical business. Now it appears that Rachel, overcome with guilt and yearning for the return of lost love, may be headed back to the man she abandoned without explanation years earlier when it looked as if she was about to be exposed. The problem for Israel is that she’s carrying a trove of state secrets around inside her head.
The widowed Ehud, brought back to trace and then reason with his renegade former agent, is under terrific pressure. His former colleagues know that he was himself in love with Rachel and may not have been as objective in managing her as he should have been. Nor is it easy for him to accept that Rachel has become such a “loose cannon” that she may have to be framed or even killed by the Mossad. Atir is straightforward and sometimes graphic in his depictions of Mossad assassinations. Rachel herself was once a party to one, staging an encounter with a German scientist who liked to kiss attractive women’s hands and dispatching him with a poisoned glove.
Among the many insights of Atir’s compelling tale is why people are drawn to this patriotic dirty work. It’s not only Zionism that impels men and women to live these highly risky undercover lives. Ehud admits that “there’s something intoxicating in our work; suddenly it’s permissible to lie, you can put on an act, and everything is sanctioned by the state.” Atir seems to be saying that it’s wise to be apprehensive about the personalities who choose to live their lives as liars. The people who do it get very good at it, however, and they have to. Rachel is warned before she takes on her original assignment that in the country where she’ll work “half the population are informers and the other half are intelligence targets who have to be watched.” Any blunders will lead to her torture and death.
Although Atir never questions Israel’s overall policies with its neighbors — the country’s survival as a Jewish state is an operational given here — he does portray heartbreakingly the moral toll on the individuals who carry out what recent Israeli governments have deemed necessary for the country’s safety. As in the works of John le Carré and Charles McCarry, here we see that in the day-to-day spy business, it’s not so much countries that are in danger but individual human souls.
Richard Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.
A true Mossad spy story that didn’t really happen
In ‘The English Teacher,’ a former IDF special ops chief offers a much-censored look at the toll the covert life takes on a female agent
By Mitch Ginsburg March 19, 2014, 3:20 am
Yiftach Reicher-Atir, the former head of the army’s special ops directorate, a onetime commando and general who led a force into the terminal in Entebbe, has written a spy novel that is blessedly free of technological wizardry and a fish-tailing plot. Instead, it is long on what counts: the soul of the spy.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email
and never miss our top stories Free Sign up!
Reicher-Atir, in “The English Teacher,” which will soon be translated into English, probes how leading a double life can erode the foundations of a spy’s former existence; how all of the lies are rooted in truth, and the truth, especially when it comes to love, is often coated in a mere patina of lies.
“This is a true story that didn’t really happen,” Reicher-Atir said during a recent interview.
The tale, which was painfully edited by the censors of the intelligence agencies, revolves around a young woman named Rachel. She is an English teacher. She was born and raised in Britain. Her father was overbearing. Her mother was distant. She was pretty but not noticeably so. She wore her manners like armor. She had daddy issues. She grappled with love. These facts are true of both Rachel Goldsmith – the real Rachel – and Rachel Brooks, the spy.
When she disappears, after sitting shivah for her father in England, and many years after her service in the Mossad, Ehud, her now retired former case officer, is called back to the office in Tel Aviv. A diligent gardener and widower, he stifles a smile when he learns that she has left England via the Chunnel, that she managed to convince her Israeli bank to wire her $100,000 cash, and that nobody at the Western Union booth in Leicester Square remembers seeing her. “She still knows the trade,” he says approvingly.
Pictures released by Dubai in 2010 of alleged Mossad suspects in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (photo credit: Youtube screenshot)
Pictures released by Dubai in 2010 of alleged Mossad suspects in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (photo credit: Youtube screenshot)
The assessment in the office is that her decision to flee, with a considerable trove of secrets in her head, is rooted in the past, in her service in the place Reicher-Atir was forced to call the “Arab capital.”
The story of her service is told through a series of conversations between Ehud and a legendary commander named Joe. These begin with a creak. Ehud, who seems aware of the truth throughout, asks to speak to Joe, to submit himself to the old man’s probing mind. Had he been forced to do so, I felt, the reluctant delivery would have concealed the fact that the story is being unspooled for our benefit.
But the contrived mechanism is quickly forgotten. Rachel’s life, and the artful way the grinding strain of her routine is depicted, is too riveting.
Reicher-Atir, who is writing an MA dissertation on the literary depiction of the killing of Arab POWs in Israeli War of Independence fiction, said he was interested in exploring the life of a female Mossad combatant on enemy soil, the mark left by the service, and the nature of the debt incurred by the state.
“There is very little surveillance of a combatant’s life,” he said, using the term preferred by Israeli intelligence officers. Fighter pilots, by contrast, are watched constantly – through cameras in the cockpit and radars on the base. “They know the speed at which they travel, the altitude, the duration, practically everything. What’s hidden during those 40 minutes of flight time?”
Yiftach Reicher-Atir, the former head of special operation's in the army's intelligence directorate, is thoroughly enjoying his literary retirement (photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)
Yiftach Reicher-Atir, the former head of special operations in the army’s intelligence directorate, is thoroughly enjoying his literary retirement (photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)
Additionally, he said, while fighter pilots are often rewarded for short bursts of danger with long stretches of tranquility, a Mossad combatant, living in an enemy country without any sort of diplomatic immunity, is forced to return to her routine – to a fabricated existence, to lovers that have to be lied to and to friends that have to be kept at an arm’s length.
In setting out the initial framework of the novel, Reicher-Atir drew inspiration from intelligence agents he knew personally and from the lives of two Mossad combatants – Erika Chambers and Sylvia Rafael.
Rafael, born in South Africa to a Jewish father and Christian mother, moved to a kibbutz in the sixties and, like the protagonist in the book, taught English before being drafted into the Mossad. She operated for years, playing an active role in the post-Munich Mossad operations in Europe, before being arrested in July 1973, in Lillehammer, Norway. Mossad assassins had killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter they mistakenly believed to be Ali Hassan Salame, the man thought to have masterminded the Munich Olympics massacre. A Mossad non-combatant, Dan Arbel, was arrested and led the police to Rafael. Her Norwegian lawyer, not inured to her charms, defended her in court – she was sentenced to five years, but served only 15 months – and then married her. Yet for Reicher-Atir, it was Rafael’s sadness late in life, she died in 2005 and is buried on Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh, which drew him to the character.
Chambers intrigued him, he said, because of “the extent of her sacrifice — of her true identity.” A graduate of a British University with a tailor-made back story of involvement in German-based Palestinian aid organizations, she flew to Beirut in late 1978, just as the net around the real Ali Hassan Salame began to close. It seems she did so with her real name and passport.
She arrived in Beirut, ostensibly for philanthropic work, and rented a high rise apartment. She painted daily on the balcony and built up a persona as a cat woman, feeding the neighborhood strays. Several months later, on January 22, 1979, Salameh’s convoy, traveling past Chambers’ apartment on Verdun Street, was stopped by a powerful blast: Chambers, who had gotten to know Salameh and become acquainted with his daily routine, allegedly hit the detonator. Later she told neighbors she had to rest and recuperate after the commotion and, after asking them to watch over the cats, slipped out of the country.
There are similar events depicted in “The English Teacher.” But they are peripheral. The focus of the book is on what is not known – the internal life of such a woman, the grinding toll of constant vigilance, the limitations on love while operating clandestinely, and the complex but ameliorating relationship between a combatant in an enemy country and his or her handler or case officer.
And Reicher-Atir, who said he was not hobbled by the secrets he holds – “they are facts; they have nothing to do with literary affairs” – is masterful in his depiction of this inner world and the scars it leaves over time.
The English Teacher
Yiftach Reicher Atir; Philip Simpson, trans.
1
Penguin Books 2016
272 Pages $16.00
ISBN: 978-0143129189
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Barbara M. Bibel
“The book you are holding in your hands is the true story of what never happened,” says author Yiftach Reicher Atir in his introductory note. His novel, based on his experience as a military intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces, examines the life of an undercover operative, Rachel Goldschmitt. Rachel takes leave to attend her father’s funeral and sit shiva, but she never returns. Instead, she empties her bank account and disappears. Ehud, her handler, receives a cryptic phone call and knows that he has to report the disappearance to the Mossad. Since Rachel was working undercover as an English teacher in an Arab town, she knows things that could damage Israel.
Ehud and his retired handler, Joe, work with the Mossad to track Rachel down. In the process, Rachel’s story is revealed and readers also learn a great deal about undercover work. The Mossad vetted and censored the book before publication, but the loneliness and constant anxiety of undercover operatives is apparent as the story unfolds. Operatives must be vigilant at all times, maintaining the identity and cover story that they have developed. Friendship is problematic and love could be dangerous. The moral and ethical situations that arise are difficult as well. The operatives must perform morally dubious deeds to defend the country that is, in many ways, exploiting them.
This is a quiet, thought-provoking page turner that will appeal to readers who enjoy John le Carré. It presents a realistic picture of the stress involved in living a double life and dilemma facing the spy handlers who care about their operatives and are responsible for their safety. The English Teacher is an excellent choice for book clubs as well as public and synagogue libraries with fiction collections.