Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

When the body of the beautiful and talented Zahara Bashari is found brutally murdered in the attic of an old house in Jerusalem, every secret, every squabble, every tension between neighbors and their diverse communities is exposed by the ensuing investigation.

In the background, relations between the Palestinians and the Jews are simmering into an escalation of the Intifada.

Leading the investigation is Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, a handsome, brooding, thoughtful man with an unfinished doctorate in history at Cambridge University.


He has just purchased an apartment around the corner from the site of the murder in the Baka neighborhood, much to the disapproval of his colleagues. On his arrival, he finds himself face-to-face with a woman from his past, Ada Levi (now Efrati), who had recently bought the house and was going through it with an architect and contractor when they discovered the body.

Zahara is the youngest child of Naeema and Ezra Bashari, Yeminite immigrants who had been given half a duplex in the neighborhood in 1948 as part of their resettlement from a transit camp. With the War of Independence. many Arab residents were abandoning their homes in the neighborhood. This made it possible for many Holocaust survivors, immigrating from Europe, to afford homes. The other half of the duplex was occupied by the Beinisches family from Romania.  The two families have been at war since the day they met.

The Beinisches' son Yoram was born a year before Zahara and is the apple of his parents' eyes. A rising star with a tech company, he has been sent to New York and returned engaged to an American woman from a wealthy family. His company has supplied him with a red car that he lovingly washes every Friday afternoon.

Not all who know Zahara love her.  She is a shrill, passionate advocate for her Yemenite heritage, traditions and people and antagonistic toward the non-Yemenite residents of the neighborhood such as Europeans or the growing numbers of Russian immigrants.

As Ohayon and his team investigate, they learn Zahara was three months pregnant -- a fact that shocks her parents, her brothers and her friends.

This novel is rich with characters on both sides of the crime. Ohayon's team has been an ongoing part of Gur's mysteries. The tensions, frustrations and power-struggles between them are as much a part of the investigation as the clues and the suspects. Each has attitudes and prejudices toward the people they meet in the investigation that affect their ability to follow the clues.

Theme of children -- parents' fears for the safety and well-being of their children, their attempts to protect them and the unspeakable tragedies that happen to the children in the Holocaust, in escaping one country for another and in living as a displaced person.

The Author: Batya Gur (1947 - 2005)

Born in Tel Aviv to Holocaust survivors, Batya Gur was an Israeli writer and literary critic.  She studied Hebrew literature and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she earned a master's degree.

She worked as a high school teacher and then moved to the United States.  When she returned to Israel, she lived in Jerusalem and wrote reviews and essays for the literary supplement of Ha-aretz. She published her first detective novel, The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case in 1988.

Her early works dealt with murders in closed societies such as a psychoanalytic society in The Saturday Morning Murder(1993), a kibbutz in Murder on a Kibbutz (1995), a group of classical musicians in Murder Duet (2000) or a university department in Literary Murder (1994).  The last two books she wrote, Bethlehem Road Murder (2006) and Murder in Jerusalem (2007) were increasingly complex and dealt with the divisions and diversity of Israeli society.