Alfred Zion was a high flying property dealer and businessman before he left Australia in 1979. He has since returned, and this book is autobiographical insofar as its hero, Nehemiah Israel, is the victim of a conspiracy by his former friends and business associates, all members of ‘The Saturday Morning Club’ – an ironic reference to their habit of discussing business affairs at the Sabbath morning service – and as contemptible a bunch of sharpies as are to be met with outside a Costigan reunion.

Poor Nehemiah: this young Israeli with but modest ambitions to make a few quick millions and own one decent late model Rolls, comes a mighty cropper. His failure, naturally, was unrelated to his delusions of grandeur; it was a conspiracy. This novel relates how this brave, secular nationalist ‘Jew’ falls foul of a blackhearted bunch of diaspora Jews, some more, others less, faithful to their religion.

Nehemiah is technically a Jew, though raised in the secularist Zionist educational system of Israel he can have little in common with diaspora Jews, and even secretly despises their chequebook Zionism.

The morals of business tycoons and their legal advisers may, one suspects, leave much to be desired; but so do those of office boys and plumbers. The WASP tycoons of the Melbourne Club are not born again Christians, nor are the Asian property millionaires of Sydney sinless navel watchers. In contrast, Zion’s depiction of Melbourne’s wealthy Jewish businessmen as scoundrels all, apart from being the verbal equivalent of the obscene antisemitic caricatures of Hitler’s unofficial minister of pornography, Julius Streicher, makes poor fiction.

Whatever their flaws, Melbourne’s Jews, rich or poor, arc widely known to be warm, friendly, hospitable and generous. There is not a believable character in the book, the sole exception being the hero, Nehetniah Israel. He emerges as a hypocrite – an Israeli secular nationalist, divorced from Judaism but ready to don Jewish garb to advance his career. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that a sequel must commence with his entry into a home for the criminally insane.

Nehetniah has a good war record, and is naturally persona grata with Melbourne’s strongly Zionist community, but fit he does not. An expatriate Israeli, he is critical of Israel and is out of step with Melbourne’s basically religious Jewish community. He cannot even get along with his assimilated in-laws. Nehetniah has a chip on his shoulder the size of Ayers Rock. He has the returned soldier’s contempt for stay-at-home jingoists, and being of Sephardic origin was raised in the anti-religious Zionist school system to dispatched.

He worries about the massacre of Arabs by Israeli border police at Kfar Khassim; he is bitter about an Israeli (western) political establishment that defends Kastner, Hungary’s wartime Zionist leader who befriended Eichmann and betrayed Hungarian Jewry; yet in his personal life, he is a conscienceless adulterer and multiple murderer. He would make a great single issue political leader.

This book is revealing, but not quite in the manner intended. It is also a useful handbook for budding corporate raiders, shyster lawyers, currency smugglers, and tycoons on the run, with handy hints for adulterers, sex deviants, high-class prostitutes, bribe brokers and multiple murderers.

Zionism set out to ‘normalise’ the Jews. Nehcmiah is an antisemitic Israeli. How normal can you get?