Golgotha

Maror #3

by Lavie Tidhar

Two men, decades apart, traverse the same land in search of fabled treasure in this haunting conclusion to Lavie Tidhar’s epic Maror Trilogy. But as the land changes and war erupts, the fate of both men leads them unerringly towards a place of skulls. Bandits and poets, dreamers and killers bar their way as Golgotha shifts from the peaceful backwater of Ottoman Palestine to the frantic final week of the British withdrawal from the Holy Land, in an extraordinary slice of a history of violence.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Israel, Fiction

352 pages, ebook

First published September 11, 2025

About the author

Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century.

Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist.

Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.

He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).

Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie.

His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century.

Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).

Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012).

He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there.

He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).

Tidhar lives with his wife in London.

Reviews

[Dima · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acting as the conclusion of the Maror trilogy, this book brings the reader into modern times and the more contemporary history of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The red thread is a legendary treasure that was, according to legend, smuggled out of the Jewish Temple before its destruction thousands of years earlier. In the late 19th century, a rogue killer-for-hire becomes entangled in the search for a map that could lead to this treasure. His journeys across Palestine are rendered reflecting meticulous research into the land and the people who inhabited it at the time.

Fast-forward to the week before Israeli independence in 1948, and a British policeman is tasked with finding a missing Englishwoman, setting off another journey through the idiosyncrasies of life in Palestine on the eve of statehood, with the treasure again at the centre. The author pulls no punches, laying out some of the atrocities committed by Jewish groups during those years.

The book is, as usual for the author, exceptionally well written. Its pacing is that of a crime thriller, and it is genuinely hard to put down. That said, it is, in my view, weaker than the previous entries in the series. Its statements feel less forceful, and its exploration of its core theme (the obsession with symbols that underpin Israel’s national identity) is less profound than, for example, the author’s treatment of land in Adama.

Still, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in an engaging and accessible window into the Arab–Israeli conflict.

[Peter Hollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, it's here now. It's finished. Lavie's long saga of the making of Israel has reached its denoument in a tale that straddles the before-times of Palestine as Zionism is becoming a thing and Jews are migrating to the Promised Land because of it, and the liminal times in the last few days of the British Mandate.

I'm writing this late (again), so I'll hide the rest for spoilers, just in case. I'll revise the text, I hope!
It's a fitting end to the series, given that Maror chronicled the criminal underbelly of 20th century Israel, in doing so painting the project of Israel itself as a kind of criminal enterprise, while Adama is the story of Jewish Holocaust survivors taking themselves - and their horrors - to Israel, making a life for themselves in a kibbutz, while in the background, Palestinian Arabs, dispossessed of their homes, march away to elsewhere, but slowly atrocities committed in the foundation of the kibbutzes and Israel itself are brought to light.

So this backwards chronology finally takes us to the beginning. Indeed, it takes us all the way back, to a proto-human Eve who loves a Neanderthal man and begins to establish a new species, in a place that will eventually become the land of skulls, Golgotha.
If Maror was literary, historical crime fiction (kinda) and Adama was a generational thriller (sorta), then Golgotha wants to be a kind of western and a kind of police procedural. Nominally the book's subject is the search for a fabled map to the treasures of the Second Temple, which to most characters holds the promise of riches, but to some of the Jews is the key to their yearned-for proof that Palestine is their Promised Land.

I do wonder if one of the deeper themes of the first two novels doesn't quite have a parallel here: in Maror, the only people to survive were those that loved Israel sufficiently, while in Adama, to survive you had to leave. The theme here is one of foreign-ness, and perhaps what we're being shown is the up-ending of any pre-existing concepts of what it might mean to be native to Palestine.
In the first half, we see Arabs and Jews (and Christians and Druze) living in relative harmony, albeit with foreigners scattering themselves all over, including tourists with Thomas Cook & Son - and our protagonist, who is named Gustav, is generally only referred to as The Foreigner. His outside viewpoint allows us to see the inhabitants of the land from a neutral point of view, all of them strange to the foreigner in their way. The foreigner's profession is that of a bounty hunter, hired to track people down and, generally, murder them. In amongst his missions, which finally do turn into a search for the lost treasures, we are shown the ambitions of the early Zionists and development, already, of their plans to take over the region.
The treasure hunt is, of course, never resolved, but most of the characters die in seeking it. At the end of the first half, the foreigner rides away from a lethal battle, presumably still searching for the treasure, and:

In this manner, he vanished from history. And what did it matter, anyway? He was only a foreigner

While the foreigner was actually Austrian, the second half of the book shows us the collapse into war that resulted from the (absolutely foreign) British withdrawing at the end of their mandate over Palestine. And we see it from the point of view of a British policeman, investigating a murder of a Jewish antiques dealer and the presumed abduction of a young Jewish woman who happens to be a British aristocrat. As this story proceeds, we see key events from strange angles, meeting Moshe Dayan and various other historical figures, learning of the nefarious activities of the Stern Gang, a Jewish paramilitary group which conducted acts of terrorism in pursuit of ousting the British and forming a Jewish state, and witnessing the aftermath of massacre and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs in a town the Jewish forces believe to be of strategic significance.

Again, there are atrocities here, and they are all based on real events, and they echo gruesomely through the history of Israel, all the way up to now, in the time of genocide. The Nakba was already in progress before the British Mandate ended - indeed, arguably it was already happening at the same time as the Shoah, the Jewish holocaust in Europe.

Throughout the trilogy, but most of all in Golgotha, the complicatedness of this region is show in detail, but I don't think it's just my projection to say that these stories also show that it's not that complicated. The Jewish takeover of a land very much inhabited was ruthless and horrific. That doesn't mean there weren't and aren't decent people, both in the foundation of the State of Israel and born & bred there. But nor does Tidhar flinch from the ugliness.

In the first two books, a policeman named Cohen is a main antagonist, a man who (as "Cohen" is the Hebrew word for "priest") is explicitly shown to symbolise the spirit of Israel itself. There's a Cohen here too, a policeman as well, as I assumed for most of the novel that he was the young version of our familiar character. But Lavie pulls the rug out from under us at the end, where Cohen and his Arab counterpart Hassan shoot each other dead in a scuffle which reveals that Cohen was one of a few bent cops who'd been searching for the treasure map themselves. This mutual, pointless murder between Jew & Arab cannot but be symbolic.

So the ruthless cop who embodies Israel is not quite present here, but this Cohen could be considered as a baby version of our defender of Israel at all costs in those first two books. So the ignominious death of Golgotha's Cohen is symbolic, not just in the iconography of the Jew and Arab killing each other, but also in the cutting off of one path between the attempted, fatally flawed egalitarianism of British policing and the spirit of what Israel would become - a corrupted, all-consuming machine that lost track of its heart before it even grew one.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars