The Avengers is everything the writer of book-jacket blurbs could hope for. It deals with a significant topic. It is well-written, even a page turner. And yet, it may be one of the most troubling books you ever read.

As author Rich Cohen will be one of the speakers featured Nov. 13 at the San Diego Jewish Book Fair at the Lawrence Family JCC, he'll no doubt address on his own or face questions about his seeming approval for an incident that was morally reprehensible.

It came after World War II, after various suspected nazi war criminals had been rounded up by the Allies and confined to a prison camp while awaiting trial at Nuremberg. The chief protagonist of this non-fiction work, Abba Kovner, decided with his small band of followers to "avenge" the deaths of the Six Million by poisoning as many of the suspected nazis as possible.

Kovner obtained work in a bakery, bided his time, and when he could do so without being caught, slathered arsenic poison on the loaves of bread that would be served to the prisoners of Stalag 13.

The New York Times reported on April 22, 1946 that 2,238 prisoners of war had been taken ill with arsenic poisoning at the camp. Wrote Cohen: "It was never clear just how many people were killed in the attack. Like a story from mythology, it varies with each telling. The New York Times said no one died, that all the German prisoners were saved in the hospital. To this day, the members of the Avengers believe this to be a self-serving fiction, a story created by American officials charged with guarding the Nazis. Other papers said thousands of the Germans died..."

Before anyone says, "They were nazi war criminals; they deserved to die!" let me remind you that they were suspected nazi war criminals. The trials would establish their guilt or innocence; Kovner had no right to substitute his judgment for that of the courts.

Is this the way we Jews protest the mass murder of our families? By becoming mass murderers ourselves? 

Cohen temporizes by suggesting that we really shouldn't be concerned how many Germans died. "To Abba," he wrote, "it was never really a matter of leaving corpses behind, but instead of leaving a story behind." Someday, a child would read in a book that "after a war in which the Jews were starved and degraded, in which millions of them were killed in factories, this ragged group, lead by a fanatic named Kovner, fought on. Their mere existence was their victory. More than anything, they left the legend of their struggle, a way to look back at history and say, 'Here there was a fight.'"

The author, you see, is haunted by the image of Jews going peacably to their slaughter. He feels shame that for the most part, Jews were crowded into ghettoes, then put onto trains.

Kovner and his small band were the exceptions. They got out of the Vilna ghetto by crawling through sewers, sometimes barely able to twist their heads high enough to breathe in tunnels of excrement. They made it to the forest. They met up with partisans. They formed their own unit. They sabotaged German trains. Two of Kovner's fiercest fighters were young girls, Vitka Kempner, his future wife, and Ruzka Korczak, her best friend. These are exploits worth cheering about. In warfare, no quarter is given nor asked for. 

But the mass poisoning of the Stalag 13 prisoners was a peacetime act of terrorism. It's intent was not to save the lives of fellow Jews, but to unleash more murder, hatred and mayhem. Kovner and his followers had been driven insane by the war.

Later, when he became an Israeli, Kovner eventually gave up his plans to kill Germans. There was another war to be fought; in the Arabs, another enemy to be faced, and other Jews to be protected. Some of Kovner's twisted followers felt abandoned. They returned to Europe to attempt more killing of Germans. Most, if not all, were themselves killed.

Coexisting inside the angry, brooding Kovner was a reflective poet, one whom Cohen suggests was among Israel's best. Kovner also was a moving force behind the creation of the Museum of the Diaspora. It was not enough to know the Holocaust happened, he rightly argued. People needed to know the culture that had been destroyed.

The murderous passions that were unleashed in Kovner's breast at times boiled over from nazi war criminals to all Germans. Had such impulses been followed to the utmost, they would have required creation of a similar "Museum of German Culture." One can imagine the sign at the entryway: "Here was a people, before they turned to nazism, that had produced Beethoven, Bach, Goethe. Too bad we had to murder them all."

Cohen, who also authored Tough Jews in 1998, is scheduled to speak to the San Diego Jewish Book Fair at noon, Monday, Nov. 13, at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center.