Why Eva Figes thinks Israel was a mistake

Mark Thwaite reviews Journey To Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land by Eva Figes

Eva Figes wrote Journey to Nowhere as a grandmother. Her head was "full of stories about the past" that were forced to the surface by the impertinent questions of her grandchildren, whose function, she suggests, is to draw such forgotten, forbidden tales into the light.

So, here is a memoir of Edith, the orphan housemaid of Figes's childhood, coupled with a polemic against Israel. Although herself a secular Jew, Figes shares the view held by some of the ultra-Orthodox that the Jewish state should never have been created: "I do not think there was ever a time when I did not think that the creation of Israel was a historic mistake."

All nation states have founding myths, stories about the past that need unearthing and investigating, but the idea that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land" was particularly questionable.

After the war, America did not want tens of thousands of displaced refugees arriving on her shores. Truman, who had no Arab voters, wanted a second term in Office and was happy to see the British further humbled. The unpopular Zionist cause suddenly became useful realpolitik.

In 1939, not long after her father had been arrested after Kristallnacht, Figes's comparatively wealthy family fled Berlin, leaving Edith behind.

Eva Figes, née Unger, was six. Her family settled in Hendon, NW11, and built a new life as London was blitzed, Berlin burned, and her father served in the Pioneer Corps.

After the war a letter arrived from Palestine from the all-but forgotten Edith. Middle-class norms were being re-established in the Unger household and, for Eva's mother, the reintroduction of a servant seemed only fitting.

Figes herself had deduced that Edith was looking far more for a family than an employer, but her cold and distant mother seemed unaware of this.

As the days counted down before Edith arrived, the young Figes realised that no preparations were being made for her arrival: "only one new item appeared in the room, a spartan washstand… I was shocked. The washstand made a clear statement." To Eva's mother at least, Edith was certainly not part of the family.

Figes was now a young woman, Anglicised, and beginning to forget her childhood German. But when she came in from school Edith would be waiting.

Eva was her only friend, and even as a child she realised how lonely Edith was. Edith's conversations are reconstructed with disconcerting accuracy.

Figes writes beautiful, quiet, rhythmic prose, prone to repetition, emphasising the points she wants Edith's story to help her make. This is artfully done, but the whole construction must be recognised for what it is: Figes's version of Edith's memories.

Edith survived in Berlin throughout the war using a guile none expected her to have. She was often hidden and helped by Germans. Prostitution is hinted at.

After the war, miserable and desperately alone, she met an old friend from her orphanage. Elsa Cohen was a pioneer, beating the drum for Jews to return to their homeland. Edith believed her propaganda and went looking for a welcoming extended family.

But when she arrived she was derided as a yekke, a Hitler Jew, and found that Palestine was not only full of Arab-Jewish enmity, but that the Jews all hated each other and the British too.

Figes's polemic against Israel - "the truth", she insists - is given substance by Edith's experience in Palestine: "To this day I remember what she told me, word for word: everyone hates everybody else."

This, Figes suggests, wasn't just Edith's view. The novelist Olivia Manning ("awful place, everyone hating everyone else"), Alison Owing, author of Frauen ("there was so much hatred… hatred among the Jews"), and a British Mandate official ("What a country - more hatred to the square mile than any other in the world") all concurred.

Edith couldn't bear it. And she fled once more back to the home of a little girl who would later see her story as one way to begin to think about why world Jewry, mostly secular anyway, needs a homeland in the first place.