Strange Fire
By Melvin Jules Bukiet
Norton, 352 pages, $24.95.

By SONIA PILCER

Melvin Jules Bukiet is a born provocateur, a merciless in-your-face jester who loves creating a balagan (mess) while he skips out the back door. At a conference last year in Washington, D.C., his keynote speech ended with a passionate rant against accommodating oneself to the Holocaust, declaring that he wanted his father's Auschwitz number on the license plate of his car. A few years earlier, in the pages of the Washington Post, he had condemned the idea of yet another Holocaust museum, especially in Washington, D.C., where the refugees were virtually abandoned during the war. In 1999, he edited "Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex" (Norton) - a giant dill pickle on its cover - and had to cope with the wrath of writers left out of his anthology.

A best-selling author in Germany, Mr. Bukiet writes fiction that makes some people uncomfortable. "After," his 1996 post-Holocaust novel, explores the moments after liberation. His characters, concentration camp survivors, are mostly scoundrels, trading their souls and Dead Persons' Identification Cards for booze, sex and their only surviving god, money. It is a frenzied black comedy played on a stage covered with ashes.

"Strange Fire" is very much of the present. In it, Mr. Bukiet deconstructs contemporary Israel, a nation at war with itself and its desperate neighbors. Bombs on Jerusalem buses, political murders, West Bank settlers, religious fanatics and armed struggles beneath the Temple Mount provide the fabric of this literary thriller.

The plot of "Strange Fire" is reminiscent of a certain genre of Israel-based novels that finds inspiration in the violence and intrigue of Middle East politics. What makes Mr. Bukiet's tale unique is the voice of its hero, or rather, anti-hero, Nathan Kazakov, who expresses the author's fierce humor.

Here is another Nathan, after Philip Roth's Zuckerman, only this one is a Russian-born homosexual, blinded as a prisoner of war during the fighting in Lebanon. "I still think he over-reacted," Nathan says of Dr. Ahmed, his captor, "by painting my lips with Drano and pinning my eyes open to the Lebanese sun."

Once a poet, now Nathan writes advertising copy masquerading as policy speeches for the prime minister, Simon ben Levi, a kind of amalgam of Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, with the former's womanizing charisma.

The novel opens as Nathan listens to Simon address a crowd in Rabin Square. Suddenly, a man in a black hat and coat suddenly charges through the crowd, brandishing a gun, and shoots Nathan.

At Hadassah Hospital, Nathan discovers that his ear has been destroyed. His reaction: "One less ear, more or less, is no big deal if the other one's okay. But now I've got to protect that precious flap, since, like the only nose I have, it connects me to the physical world. How's that for a title: My Right Ear."

Nathan is befriended by a fellow Russian, the doctor he calls Ivan, who will become his sidekick on a journey through the interstices of the Israeli landscape as Nathan tries to understand why Reb Isaiah Rubinstein, a West Bank fanatic, would try to kill him.

"Maybe his younger brother was the faygele with payes I seduced in a bathhouse in Ramat Gan last year, and the big boy with the tzitzis only got the news yesterday, and felt he had to defend the family honor. Nonsense." More likely, he thinks, the killer was after Simon or perhaps his dovish son, the archaeologist Gabriel ben Levi -"a rock star" in Israel.

Like Tiresias, the blind Theban seer, Nathan's infirmity has given him special gifts. The most developed one is olfactory - his Jewish schnoz, which informs him (and the reader) of the sensuous smells of the labyrinthine streets of Jerusalem. There is a voluptuous feast of spices sold in the shuk, its coffee houses like Abdullah's in the Old City; Dregs, a gay bar, and the "entirely unkosher" Ghetto Café, "where Israeli Holocaust survivors could feel at home among their own kind" and there was "a strand of barbed wire gaily strung with hundreds of tiny white Christmas lights - a Jewish chandelier."

Led by Nathan's nose, followed by Ivan and Goldie, his sage shepherd, we go on a wild conspiracy chase that takes us from Beis Machpelah, a settlement near Hebron made up of former Brooklynites that has no "biblical pedigree," to a cave near the Dead Sea where Nathan's entire body begins to tingle. "What is the cave made of?" "Uranium." "There's no uranium in Israel." "That's the problem. We're not in Israel," says their leader Moshe X, known as the venerable Der Alter.

Meanwhile, mayhem rules in the fractious government once Nathan starts snooping in high official places, learning of a secret plan known as Strange Fire. He must confront the powers that be: Simon's beautiful mistress and master strategist, Serena; Khadoury, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's CIA, and his secretive superior, Klein, as well as Noam, an embittered Sephardic apparatchik. Nathan will not understand the meaning of Strange Fire until a murdered coin dealer in Jerusalem leaves behind an arrangement of coins whose numeric code turns out to be a Torah portion.

Often "Strange Fire" reads as a fantastic trip through the subterranean fields of Israeli paranoia that ends in a maze much like the streets of the Old City. Actually, the book concludes within the controversial tunnel excavated beneath the Western Wall. It would be unfair to say more, except that Mr. Bukiet's bold, mocking shtick and antic imagination nail the reader till the last page.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to go through this tunnel with a guide and several armed soldiers. At the end of the tour, there was a large model of the Temple that lit up. A little girl in front of me chirped to her mother, "I made a wish - a wish that we can see the Third Temple soon."

In a climate of messiah-driven zealots and cynical politicians, "Strange Fire" offers a glint of light through the sightless eyes of its character. "In the land of the blind, Nathan Kazakov is king," he declares. "With one eye, I'd be God."

Ms. Pilcer is the author of four novels. Her newest work is a collection of interconnected stories, "The Holocaust Kid" (Persea Books).