"Bakhurim tovim" ("Good Fellows") by Sara
Angel, Arye Nir Publishing, 383 pages, NIS 89

0ne of the scenes in Martin Scorsese's movie "Goodfellas" shows the main character, Henry, an up-and-coming gangster, going into the club where his underworld friends are hanging out. This is an amazing scene, and not just because of its cinematic virtuosity. Filmed in one long shot, it shows things from Henry's perspective. Henry is overwhelmed by this world he so longs to be part of - a world where crime pays, money flows, the women are beautiful and friends are loyal. Only later does he, and the audience, discover the hatred, vengeance and betrayal that are simmering beneath the surface, and learn from personal experience the heavy price he will pay for his choice of company.

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Sara Angel, the author of "Bakhurim Tovim" ("Good Fellows"), which I presume is a reference to Scorsese's movie, worked as a bartender at the Peacocks Club before plunging of her own free will into the sea of Israeli organized crime. In the early 1980s, this was the hot spot for Tel Aviv mobsters. This is where love first bloomed between Sara, a university Bible student, and the psychopathic murderer Shmaya Angel (as Sara herself calls him). The two became partners in every respect, including criminal activity, which landed them both in jail.

Shmaya Angel, as Israelis may recall, was arrested for the murder of two drug dealers. While sitting in jail and awaiting his trial, he and Herzl Avitan murdered their cellmate, stabbing him 131 times. Sara Angel's beauty, along with her rhetorical skills as well as those of her defense lawyer, charmed the court. She got away with a three-year sentence for gun running and drug smuggling. After her release from prison, she became a writer, journalist and well-known TV personality. Much of her fame was linked to Shmaya, whom she eventually divorced. It was as though she had some kind of blood-soaked mantle with the name "Angel" embroidered on it wrapped around her shoulders.

"Good Fellows" is about the world of crime, but apart from the title, there is no connection to the movie, which was based on the screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi, a former crime reporter. Nor does it bear any resemblance to "Prizzi's Honor" by Richard Condon, or the television series "The Sopranos." This is not a novel in which the author is trying to say something about herself, or
possibly about the world we live in.

I do not delude myself. No reader of Haaretz book reviews would expect Sara Angel to come up with a literary masterpiece. All we might look forward to is that someone so inextricably bound up in what we call the "underworld" (as if there were no connection to our own), would bring us some insider view of that world - the view of someone who "was there." But "Good Fellows" does not offer any such thing. It describes the Israeli crime scene from the vantage point of a crime reporter - and not a very good one, I'm afraid.


The book does not have a gripping plot or intriguing, multi-layered characters, and there are no relationships that touch the reader in any way. Maybe it's because the characters are so alike. Whether Angel is writing about a plumber who gets mixed up in crime, a former Mossad agent or a criminal who grew up in the slums, they always sound like the same psychopathic murderer. The world according to Sara Angel is a narrow, monochromatic, Darwinistic place: Kill or be killed. It is ruled by ruthless psychopaths with no moral inhibitions. The slightest affront to their honor or perceived trespass on their territory ignites a holy inferno.

One of the main characters is Yehoshua, a hapless plumber who finds himself, at the age of 34, sitting in a jail cell with dangerous criminals. Yehoshua manages to survive with the help of an ex-Mossad agent, and ends up as a kind of world-class mobster in the style of Zeev Rosenstein.

The Mossad agent is a clone of Felix Abutbul, a crime
boss from Netanya who was bumped off outside his casino in Prague and now has a son starring in the crime pages. The two of them, the plumber and the Mossad agent, are rivals of Shimshon Amsili, the king of the underworld and the star of Angel's book. In the end, in a climax chapter that reads like a Hollywood action movie, they kill Amsili's beloved wife, Sarit. But they don't have time to enjoy the fruits of this murder because meanwhile, another psychopathic killer gets out of jail and usurps the former king's place.

The person describing this bloodthirsty gang is a kind of smooth-talking chick who jabbers away a mile a minute. But in the parts where she tries to get literary, the results are pretty ridiculous: "His stomach spun around like the drum of a washing machine doing a loop-the-loop. He was no longer aware of his body. He was no longer aware of anything: Shimshon Amsili was in love for the first time in his life." Or how about this: "Victor's eyes grew round with fear as he made his first acquaintance with death." Well, I'll be darned. Did he ever make a second acquaintance? And finally: "His thick lips flitted along her neck, his breathing filling her main artery like a hot air pump."

Disturbing book
Like the telenovelas you see on TV, "Good Fellows" has no subtext. The characters make no effort to conceal their feelings or desires.

Everything is open and on the table. The spectrum of emotion is limited and devoid of nuances. Greed, hatred and revenge are the standard motives. Needless to say, there is no irony, humor or insights that go beyond gangland cliches. Angel's literary model, it seems, is Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" - one of the most widely read books in the Israeli prison system (many inmates read it as a kind of manual, if you ask me).

But Angel is more ambitious than Mario Puzo. "Good Fellows" does not restrict itself to a single crime family, like the Corleones. It tries to encompass the whole world of organized crime in Israel over the past 30 years. Anyone who follows the crime reports in the newspapers will find carbon copies of the Alperon brothers, Zeev Rosenstein, the Aberjils, the Netanya-based Abutbul family and the Arab mobsters of Jaffa and Lod. Only representatives of the Russian Mafia are missing (hey - why the discrimination?).

The outcome is a disturbing book, not so much because of its content, but because of the phenomenon it reflects: Why are criminals in this country being turned into cult figures? Why is Tuvya Oshri, serving a life sentence on two counts of murder, invited to discuss "The Sopranos" on a talk show? Not only is no moral judgment passed on the characters in this book, but my sense is that the author, who obviously knows her readership well, actually feels this way. The book could have been interesting if it had tried to grapple with such issues as how women function in a world where men reign supreme - and I mean in terms of plot, not theoretically. Do they do it by internalizing male codes in some radical way? By exploiting these codes for their own purposes?

The trouble is that women in this book are nothing but doormats. They submissively accept their subjugation. This choice seems odd to me, not least because in real life, if I remember correctly from my days as a police intelligence officer, there were some women (including Sara Angel) of a different breed altogether - dominant women who took an active part in the most daring criminal exploits. They didn't sit around waiting for their partners, or vice versa. Characters like these have fired, and continue to fire, the imaginations of writers and filmmakers around the world. But Angel, despite her notorious but fascinating past (and I do not mean this ironically), is totally useless when it comes to insights of this kind.

A week ago, I turned on the radio a few minutes before the news and heard Avri Gilad talking about a wonderful and entertaining book he had read that was so good he couldn't put it down - "Good Fellows" by Sara Angel. He had no problem whatsoever with the book and its implications for Israeli culture, and was convinced he was getting an "inside" glimpse of the Israeli underworld. While not a literary tour de force, he found it "absolutely fascinating." So who am I to complain, self-righteous prig that I am? What do I know?

Haim Marin is a playwright and screenwriter.