The Foolish Immortals

Description for THE FOOLISH IMMORTALS by Paul Gallico:

JOE SEARS, age thirty-six, smart, fast, experienced---and a failure---was three hundred dollars away from being rock-bottom, stony broke and no prospects.  HANNAH BASCOME was said to be the richest woman in the world and at the age of seventy-six feared only two things:  death and taxes.

Joe needed a Big Idea to get back on his feet and when he read a newspaper account of how Hannah Bascombe wanted to outlive the government to keep her fortune from them, Joe decided to go to work.  Armed with some convincing Biblical facts on longevity, and in partnership with a young Polish Jew names Ben-Isaac Levi who had a learned uncle in Israel, Joe set out for his initial interview with Hannah, full of confidence.  But Joe hadn't reckoned with Clary Adams, Miss Bascombe's beautiful secretary-companion, who saw the transparency of his scheme right away and did her best to keep him from seeing her employer.  Joe, on the other hand, saw through Clary---saw her as a girl who had sublimated her natural instincts for love and warmth in return for the security and luxury of life as Hannah Bascombe's confidante.

The stage was set for a conflict of purpose and personality.  Hannah, once she had heard of Joe Sear's proposition, was determined to set out immediately for the Holy Land to find the Fruit of the Tree of Life Joe had promised her.  Joe, torn between his greed and his fear of being exposed by Clary, had to play along, Ben-Isaac, who had his ow reason for wanting to go to Israel, had them all under the spell of his almost uncanny charm.

But once in Israel, a change seemed to come over them all.  It was as if the very nearness of places like Nazareth and Jerusalem had brought a new meaning into their search.  Each was searching for a different thing...yet somehow each one's search was inexorably leading toward a far different goal than had been dreamed of back in California.  Thus begins a taut, often exciting, and always moving drama of human search and fulfillment against a background of the old Palestine and the new Israel.