The Gavriel Tirosh Affair

“You need to realize that seventeen-year-olds are capable of more than being lookouts and distributing hard-boiled eggs. You’ve forgotten what being young is like. Young people are readier to risk their lives than older ones because they’ve never encountered death and aren’t afraid of it. A few hundred of them trained as a strike force will make the Jewish underground feared and respected.”  In 1936, Palestine is under the British Mandate. Arab rioting against the Jews accelerates, the British respond by limiting the entry of Jews fleeing Europe, and the Jewish leadership of Palestine exercises a policy of restraint. The new history teacher who takes over the junior class of a Jerusalem high school is convinced that a group of his students can be educated to help change the course of Jewish history by changing the way Jews respond to being threatened and displaced.  Recalling that fateful time, the novel The Gavriel Tirosh Affair takes stock of what the students and their teacher accomplish. It is astonishing how many of the challenges in the novel remain strikingly relevant today.