A novel by Richard Steinitz 

Reviewed by R. M. Kiel

Richard Steinitz will be the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of ESRA in TEL AVIV on Sunday, December 9, 2012 and will discuss the topic of "Writing and publishing a novel in the digital age". For further information, call 09 748 2957.

Richard Steinitz’s first book, Murder Over the Border, is a detective novel set in Israel, revolving around the Oslo peace process.

That the book was written at all could probably be called accidental. Steinitz grew up with no Zionist background, had not belonged to any Jewish youth group and had no intention of living in Israel. He knew that he had many relatives in Israel and had met some of them when they visited the US. His knowledge of and interest in Israel was minimal.

But he spent a semester during his university education in Paris - supposedly learning French – actually learning to drink French beer (not bad) and smoke French cigarettes (horrible). He also became aware of the rest of the world and picked up the beginnings of a political outlook of his own.

Timing is everything. He was in Paris from January to June, 1967. The events of June 1967 changed his life forever.

When the Six-Day War broke out, Steinitz immediately went to the Israeli Embassy in Paris, along with thousands of others, to offer his help in any way possible. By the time all the volunteer applications were processed, the war was long over. He bought a second-class train ticket to Istanbul. From Turkey, he flew in a Turkish Airlines propeller plane and landed at Lod in early July. His life took a turn he would never have predicted.

Steinitz returned to the US to finish his university education, but by the end of November 1968 he was back in Israel to see what living here would be like. Two months later he was in the army, learning Hebrew and discovering how to be an Israeli – the hard way. Upon completing his service, he was adjusted, acclimatized and ready to go to work.

Murder Over the Border was written in the aftermath of a stint of reserve duty in the army at a little army post like the one described in the book. There was something about the place that nagged at Steinitz’s imagination, and drove him to become a writer. It took him several years to start writing the book, as he had never done any creative writing before. The process itself took something like seven years to complete.

40-plus years later Steinitz is still in Israel, approaching retirement and working on his second novel – not a detective story this time, but Israeli-oriented. He hopes to finish this second book in much less than seven years.