A Burnt Offering: a fable and linked story (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798652377960)

This compelling and thought-provoking short novel is about Israel on the verge of being attacked by nuclear-armed missiles launched by Iran. It is both a tale about the response of Israeli Intelligence and a contemporary version of the biblical fable, the Sacrifice of Isaac. Ari Schneider, the head of Intelligence Operations, believes that he must act, even if as a threatening maverick, to stop the movement toward nuclear war. His father, Rami, a retired diplomat and elderly survivor of the Holocaust, struggles to intercede and confront Ari's dangerous actions. The old man is harrowed by the responsibility of how to act for peace in a world of extreme and pervasive violence; such are the conditions that Ari tried to face with his desperate acts and which now the world at large confronts. There is a clandestine group of Palestinians whose leader plots to assault Israeli intelligence headquarters in Jerusalem, and in a simultaneous development, the Schneiders' college-age daughter, Gily, becomes increasingly involved with a progressive boyfriend. Finally, in this moral fable about both a nation and a family, there is the adolescent son, Moshe, who courageously confronts his father with knowledge he has gleaned from his scientist cousin in America about the horror of nuclear war. The unfolding fable advances in tandem with Schneider's undercover operations to create a unique and disturbing version of the Sacrifice of Isaac. Ari discloses to the government that his foreign operatives have received weapons of warning which he alone knows how to recall - 'small' tactical nuclear bombs from the Israeli arsenal in Dimona - and the action of this 'special operation' heightens the terror of the parable. The mystery and tragic intensity increase in confrontations with his wife, his son, and above all his father, Rami. Ari still resists despite the tension of self-doubt in him, and in the climactic encounter between father and son, Rami argues that the ages-old struggle marking the past of the Jews must also mark their future, and that nuclear weapons can never be used in a just cause. Ari holds fast, and in an ultimate attack on his son, echoing the Sacrifice of Isaac, Rami compels himself to tell Ari something about his origins that invalidates all his assumptions about his identity. The double bind of his fate collapses in on him, and with nothing more to hold him up, he breaks down.An absent character and his family who have haunted the characters in this short novel is at the center of an added and independent section here at the end - "Dr. Morris Weisberg - An Introduction;" this final part of the book are the opening chapters of a new novel about the American pathologist and relative of Ari's mother, titled "Pathological States." Dr. Weisberg was brought from Poland to America by his father when he was three, in 1904; as a result, his branch of the Weiberg family escaped the Holocaust, which murdered all of the other branch of the Weisbergs except Ari's mother, Magda. All told, the powerful, two-part book is 60,000 words.

Author: Daniel C. Melnick
ISBN-13: 9798652377960
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 06/13/2020
Pages: 244
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.55d