Death of a Monk is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Alon Hilu

Alon Hilu

Alon , is an Israeli novelist.His first novel, Death of a Monk , is based on a historical blood libel against the Jews in Damascus, Syria, and offers an original homosexual interpretation for the historical events...

, an Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i writer, published in 2004.

The novel is based on the blood libel

Blood libel

Blood libel is a false accusation or claim that religious minorities, usually Jews, murder children to use their blood in certain aspects of their religious rituals and holidays...

 against the Jews in Damascus, Syria in 1840.

The novel is based around the historical incident known as the Damascus affair

Damascus affair

The Damascus affair was an 1840 incident in which the accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus. Eight notable Jews of Damascus were falsely accused of murdering a Christian monk, imprisoned and tortured. Several of the imprisoned died of torture,...

, offers a different interpretation, and has caused astonishment among historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

s by adding a homosexual interpretation for the historical events.

The novel was one of the five finalists of the prestigious Sapir Award in Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 (2005), and was awarded the Presidential Prize for Literature (Israel, 2006). Death of a Monk was written at first in Hebrew and had been translated into English (Harvill Secker, London) and other European languages.

The real historical events of "the Damascus Affair" are the disappearance of a monk

Monk

A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

 on the eve of Passover

Passover

Passover is a Jewish holiday and festival. It commemorates the story of the Exodus, in which the ancient Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt...

 in the Jewish quarter of Damascus. It led to blood libel

Blood libel

Blood libel is a false accusation or claim that religious minorities, usually Jews, murder children to use their blood in certain aspects of their religious rituals and holidays...

 against the Jews, putting some of them in jail while others were killed.

The novel Death of a Monk leads to certain inevitable outcomes - though not by expected means - and, in Hilu's imaginative re-telling, not everyone is who they seem to be. Hilu has taken a piece of history and cast it in another light.

Hilu vividly recreates the twisted alleyways of the old city of Damascus, its air scented with anisette, araq, coffee and lemon; he equally vividly reveals the hero's attraction to other men and his perpetual struggle to assert himself.

Plot summary

The plot occurs in Damascus

Damascus

Damascus , commonly known in Syria as Al Sham , and as the City of Jasmine , is the capital and the second largest city of Syria after Aleppo, both are part of the country's 14 governorates. In addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major...

, 1840. Aslan is a 15 years old religious, Jewish teen, one of the outwardly pampered sons of the Farhi family. Additionally, he is gay. Behind closed doors, he is abused and beaten by his siblings, mother and father; at school the other kids make fun of him, especially when he and Moussa, another delicate lad, are caught holding hands.

The outcome of this tender incident speaks volumes about the power of Aslan's father in the community: when this news gets out, Moussa simply vanishes.

But there's even more going on behind the Farhi household doors. When his father is away, Aslan's mother dresses her son in her clothes, shoes and make-up - and these are their most (and maybe the only) intimate moments together. At any other time, she sides against him with the rest of the family. Miserable, Aslan grasps at anything he can to put himself out of his misery, including trying to become fatally infected when there's an outbreak of the plague.

When his father marries him off at the age of 15 to a rabbi's daughter, things go from bad to worse as Aslan is unable to consummate the marriage

Marriage

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...

. His solution involved succumbing to passions of his own, a tremulous step that takes him down a secretive road of pleasure mixed with fear.

As he becomes bolder in his forays to explore and enjoy the forbidden nightlife of the city, Aslan becomes enamoured with a young woman singer, Umm-Jihan, and catches the eye of Father Tommaso, an Italian monk

Monk

A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

. Aslan's meeting and further interaction with the monk spur on the plot, when the monk has a heart attack

Myocardial infarction

Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...

 and dies, while Aslan's secret makes him hide the body. That leads to a blood libel against the Jews, blaming them, with no evidence, for the murder of the monk, in a vicious trial with grim results.

Aslan observes his family's long-standing feud with a rival merchant family, and the blaming of all the community because of his secret and of his being in the closet. One of the memorable things he says is:

"why is it that men cannot love one another more, instead of beating and striking, oppressing and debasing, despoiling and destroying?"

Ultimately, his attempts to assert himself to his father prove terrible and tragic.

External links

• Death">of a Monk, by Alon Hilu, Sex, lies and a road from Damascus to Jerusalem. By Moris Farhi - The Independent, book review.
• The official site of Alon Hilu