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...never be said of Arthur Koestler that he picks the easy ones. In his powerful anti-Communist novels (Darkness at Noon, Arrival and Departure) and non-fiction (The Yogi and the Commissar) this tough-minded graduate of Europe's concentration camps sprang hip-deep into the great moral problems of our time. At 41, ex-Communist, now-Socialist Koestler is easily the top intellectual argufier writing today. Still picking the tough ones, he has now written a novel about Palestine and the Jews who claim it as their home. Thieves in the Night will not add a cubit...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Koestler on Palestine | 11/4/1946 | See Source »

...time chosen by Koestler is 1937-39, a tense period when many Jews turned from the conference table to armed terrorism. Koestler tells the story of a typical Jewish commune and the 25 pioneers from Europe who settled it. Starting from scratch on a barren, rock-strewn hilltop, they wind up, two years later, with a self-sufficient agricultural community supporting 300. Another novelist might have made this the whole show (having fitted in the appropriate love affairs and local Arab color), but for Koestler it is only a beginning. By the time he is through...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Koestler on Palestine | 11/4/1946 | See Source »

Witness-Box Characters. Koestler starts with loaded dice. The very qualities that make Thieves in the Night first-rate Jewish special pleading make it also unsatisfying as fiction. Every character is part of a carefully arranged witness-box cast, and the arrangement is too deliberate ly designed to give both sides of the story. It is almost as if the author didn't quite trust his Zionist approach to stand on its own feet...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Koestler on Palestine | 11/4/1946 | See Source »

...impression left with the reader is of an ultimate canceling out of whatever Koestler sets up, either as argument or character prop. Viewing the weak fictional fagade, neutral readers as well as pro-and anti-Zionists are apt to find themselves wishing that the job had been done as straight journalism...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Koestler on Palestine | 11/4/1946 | See Source »

...Author. Budapest-born Arthur Koestler lives on a sheep farm in North Wales, is now staying at the tiny Left Bank Hotel Montalembert, where he has rewritten his play Twilight Bar (a flop in the U.S., it never reached Broadway) for a Fans performance. He refuses to identify himself as a Zionist, says he doesn't approve of terrorism but can understand the Jews' bitterness and despair. To write Thieves in the Night he drew on two years of banging around in the Near East (20 years ago) as a correspondent for a German paper. He took...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Koestler on Palestine | 11/4/1946 | See Source »

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