Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Paperback, 288 pgs, Pub Jan 23rd 2018 by Penguin Books (first published March 2013, ISBN13: 9780143128793, Lit Awards: الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية (أي باف) / International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) (2014), Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2018)

It won’t come as any surprise to anyone that this novel is about the war in Baghdad, the one which has gone on relentlessly since 2003. Saadawi won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for this work about the people trying to—literally—piece their lives together amidst endless bombings and heavy doses of despair.

The diversity of Iraqi culture is one highlight in this novel, the first people we see in any depth being one of the large numbers of Christians, not Shi’ite, Sunni, Yazidis, Ahl-e Haqq, Mandeans, Shabak, and Bahá’í, or any other of the many religions that were commonly found in Baghdad before the war.

"I’ll tell you something. I don’t think my family were originally Arabs…I think [we] were Sabean who converted to Islam,” said Mahmoud.

Mahmoud is a journalist in a struggling newspaper. The owner doesn’t seem to care enough about news and is instead, like the rest of the city, looking for opportunities to make money. The city’s population has a large contingent of people who no longer trust in their god but have revived an interest in the astrology of their forbears.

Mahmoud gets a scoop, a digital audio archive of the man thought to be terrorizing the city’s citizens. The man, called Whatsitsname, had been created by a grieving junk man, Hadi, from the bits of people left after bombings. Whatsitsname was meant to be memorial to all the people who died but who have no bodies to bury. Hadi had meant no disrespect, and certainly never anticipated Whatsisname would come to life in the midst of a terrible electrical storm…

Lightly told, the story’s humor saves it from a reality too terrible to contemplate. Originally composed of body parts from ‘innocents,’ Whatsitsname gradually found himself replacing bits and pieces of those people he’d already avenged, eventually using parts from terrorists themselves, or criminals and crooks. This made his psychic paybacks much more fraught and complicated.

“…who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day. ‘Each of us has a measure of criminality…’”

More importantly, we begin to question what it means to share destinies with others, some we do not like or do not trust, and even some people we barely know. If the coarse and criminal ‘get the girls,’ what does it mean to be chaste? As for the Frankenstein, Whatsitsname, “they have turned me into a criminal and a monster, equating me with those I seek to exact revenge on.” But he continues to exist, changing features and nature, reflecting those whose parts he attaches.

As an examination of the fragmentation that has taken place in a diverse but harmonious society when death is sown recklessly and nonsensically, this novel is a window. As a novel in the Western tradition, it manages to convey a complex psychological portrait of a city, not merely of individuals. Were it a painting, it would feature a lot of red and black. It is definitely an indication that life has not been extinguished yet, that confusion sowed is being digested, and the city may rise again.



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Habibi by Craig Thompson

Hardcover, 672 pgs, Pub Sept 20th 2011 by Pantheon, ISBN13: 9780375424144, Lit Awards: Harvey Awards Nominee for Best Graphic Album-Original, Best Artist (for Craig Thompson), Best Cartoonist (for Craig Thompson) (2012), Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist (for Craig Thompson) (2012), IGN Award for Best Original Graphic Novel (2011)

In an interview Craig Thompson told his audience that artists must become vulnerable if their work is to mean anything. This dark and agonized work has a great deal of nakedness in it, both literally and figuratively, and a lot of staring directly at human experience and trying to make sense of it. It also looks with a colder, more dispassionate and assessing eye at the overlap in the religious teachings of Christianity and Islam.

This is Thompson’s fourth published work, and one glance inside gives some idea why it took six years to complete. The graphic work is fantastically detailed and patterned, which over more than six hundred pages becomes claustrophobic and oppressive with patterns repeated again and again in different combinations. This is partly due to the size of the pattern, which seems to become more and more compressed as the story progresses, and the more-black-than-white palette.

The patterns are beautiful, and may represent mathematical principles that sustain the progress upon which the world is built, but by the end I got the distinct impression Thompson was asking us to question even that progress: is it good? Who is it good for and how can it be modified to suit a different world with better outcomes? One is not accustomed to such weighty questions in the work of graphic artists.

Thompson is unique in many ways, but certainly the source of his questioning may come from his fundamentalist Christian upbringing in rural Wisconsin, an upbringing he explores in his second graphic novel and the first large-scale project of his career, Blankets. Thompson freely admits he still believes in God, but he is less sure now how best to worship him.

That his father was a plumber Thompson credits with the understanding that water is precious. This book is plumbed through with references to the primacy and importance of water in our world, our lives. This aspect of the book was another piece that elevated the story-telling to something essential.

Some discussion among reviewers condemns the sex, violence, and numerous representations of the naked human form depicted in this work as gratuitous. I will argue that is not the case. There is no question that the storyteller in this case is frightened by and ashamed of his powerful sexual feelings, but his arousal is well within the bounds of normal male sexuality and should, in fact, educate readers about the conflicted emotional trauma that can accompany the physical manifestations of desire.

In the years Thompson worked on this book, he learned to appreciate and to write some Arabic script, but never learned to speak. His translators and friends in the endeavor to understand Islam—its culture, science, and art—reviewed the story he created to check for realism and racism. In the end, any understanding readers take away about the religion or culture of the region belong to Thompson alone, but I suspect he feels confident in his depiction.

Simply sketched, the story is as follows: a light-skinned girl and a dark-skinned boy find themselves orphaned in the desert. They make a life and grow up together for a period of years before they are violently separated. They spend a long period of time hoping to find one another again and then one day, they do. The story has an impetus and emotion even without the later personality-defining moments of coercion and despair depicted with the same pitiless camera-eye that captured their earlier life.

If I say that there are many complications and observations along the way, it will give you scant warning for the deluge that is to come. This work is huge, covering enormous ground, picking up and putting down again many topics worthy of examination and discussion. It is overwhelming, as it undoubtedly was to write. I have never determined how an editor deals with slimming the opus of an auteur. The only thing I can think of is that cut pages or threads could be sold separately once the work has been published to acclaim.

Thompson’s willingness to look closely at who we are evinces in me admiration and gratitude, not censure. I look eagerly forward to what he decides to do next, whether it be drawing, writing, or something else of his choice. He is extraordinary in every way.



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Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Edited by Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman

Paperback, 448 pages, Pub May 30th 2017 by Harper Perennial ISBN13: 9780062431783

These collected essays about the writers’ separate experiences in the occupied territories of Israel/Palestine have a kind of cumulative bludgeoning effect. The reader passes through stages of rage and resistance to the kind of stupefaction one encounters in a bombing war. Why on earth would anyone do such things? They’ve been led to it slowly, gradually, until the ‘enemy’ is ‘other’ and normal human rights rules do not apply.

In a very short introduction, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman admit they’d not paid attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years because it was such a dispiriting subject. But in 2014 Waldman attended a conference organized by Breaking the Silence, a nonprofit organization composed of former Israeli soldiers who had worked in the occupied territories and who opposed Israel policies there as a result.

When Waldman related to Chabon what she had learned and seen during and after the conference in 2014,

“…we both began to realize that storytelling itself—bearing witness, in vivid and clear language, to things personally seen and incidents encountered—has the power to engage the attention of people who, like us, have long since given up paying attention, or have simply given up.”

The stories are absorbing and diverse and really give us an idea what life has been like, and is like now, for Palestinians. An international cast of writers, Geraldine Brooks, Colm Tóibín, Madeleine Thien, Dave Eggers, Anita Desai, among many others, have each looked, thought, and written their experience. It is exhilarating, infuriating, surprising, and meaningful. We learn new things. We see what they have seen. Injustices are recognized, spoken, acknowledged. And the writing, well, it is everything we anticipated.

Reading this book all at once puts pressure on one’s peace of mind. Read it in pieces if you like, one or two by authors you admire, or by authors you’d never heard of. Just read a couple to get a sense of the crisis again, to see how it has evolved. Just bear witness a little while. This is something happening right now, as we sit down to a plentiful dinner in a comfortable chair. Just a moment to recognize that this is something we can actually do something about. This isn’t a natural disaster. It is policy grown gnarly and twisted over years.

Mario Vargas Llosa has an essay in the collection and his view is long, and wide. “…I feel that the ever more colonialist bias of recent governments—I am referring to the governments of Sharon and Netanyahu—may be terribly prejudicial to Israeli democracy and the future of their country.” He, like most of us in the U.S., love Israelis for being irrepressible, but we do not love what they have done in this case. They are losing their national identity, not enhancing it.

My two three favorite essays in the bunch are written by Michael Chabon, Rachel Kushner, and Helon Habila. In “Giant in a Cage,” Chabon visits with a Palestinian businessman who set up some mini-malls anchored by a grocery store in Ramallah. There is something Chabon did that made me feel like I was sitting in that car that was forced to go the long way around an arbitrary checkpoint: he left the uncomfortable silences in his story. His host stopped speaking for a time after encountering the soldiers manning the checkpoint.

“The soldier roused himself from his torpor long enough to shrug one shoulder elaborately and give Sam Bahour a look in which were mingled contempt, incredulity, and suspicion about the state of San’s sanity. It appeared to have been the stupidest, most pointless, least answerable question anyone had ever asked the soldier…[he] had no idea why he had been ordered to come stand with his gun and his somnolent young comrade at this particular fork in the road on this particular afternoon, and if he did, the last person with whom he would have shared this explanation was Sam…”

Encountering the young soldiers completely derailed Sam Bahour and Chabon’s plans, apparently so common an occurrence that another incident of it just added to the indignities and humiliations suffered daily by Palestinians, even Palestinians who have gained some stature in the community. But look also what the circumstance has done to the Israeli soldiers. They are stupid with boredom at their post, and have learned to treat Palestinians as lesser beings. They are likewise suppressing their natural human dignity and are trashing the social contract humans have with one another. This isn't war, remember, or so they've told us.

Occasionally when reading these pieces, one gets a glimpse of what the policies surrounding the illegal occupation are doing to the children, our future. Rachel Kushner’s story, “Mr. Nice Guy,” centered on her visit to the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem. Her description of the high-rise buildings there evoke an involuntary embarrassed laugh, they sound so…unsound. The young boy following her around as she looks up at the structure says, “This building is stupidly built. It’s junk.” He and his family live there. See what I mean about infuriating?

And Habila's "The Separation Wall" gives us a honest man's incredulity. Just read it.

Each story gives a different aspect of living in the occupied territories that you’d never thought of. Read one or two three just to get a sense. A brief Interview with the editors Chabon and Waldman gives a sense of what they intended by writing this book.



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A Hope More Powerful Than The Sea by Melissa Fleming

Hardcover, 288 pages Pub January 24th 2017 by Flatiron Books Orig Title A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival ISBN13: 9781250105998

Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with horror and disbelief. Of a boat holding 500 people, eleven survived.

Even before the cruelty of rival smugglers (I only assume that’s who they were), Doaa’s life was filled with harsh treatment and a constant threat of kidnapping or physical abuse at the hands of strangers. Forced to leave Syria as a seventeen-year-old when government forces started targeting rebellious youth in her hometown of Daraa and outright killing townspeople and dumping their bodies, Doaa was sympathetic to the rebellion. The rebellion, however, was diffuse and never allowed to develop widely before government forces came down hard.

The Al Zamel family fled through Jordan to Egypt, where they were welcomed at first by the the local populace and by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were distributing food and blankets under the protection of the Morsi government. This Egypt piece of Doaa’s journey I didn’t want to skim over: I had so many questions about why young men were constantly asking for the girls hands in marriage, unless this was meant as a jibe, a joke, or a kind of harassment. Did Egyptians perceive Syrians as wealthier, more educated, or more sophisticated? If so, why? Why did I get the impression that Doaa looked down on the Egyptian locals? Was it just a cultural distance?

When a another young Syrian expatriate, Bessem, decided upon seeing Doaa that he wanted to marry her, I started feeling that distance one does when viewing another country’s cultural norms. This is so far from acceptable in the United States, despite Bessem’s friendliness and gift-giving to the family, that I was uncomfortable with the inevitability of it all. I understand the family was under duress. That is really the only condition under which such a decision to marry that man could be acceptable. Sure enough, shortly after agitating constantly and finally getting his way, Bessem, then insisted the two of them depart Egypt for either Syria or Europe.

Doaa was emotionally coerced into accepting the decision to move, and I resent this, even from my distance of several years and many miles. That she later recalled this man as the great love of her life shows us how circumstances change perceptions. I resent that change in her emotional landscape, and can’t help but see it as a kind of dishonesty. However, placed next to all the other things in her experience, a kind of fake love is surely least awful. She had a horrific experience getting to Europe, and deserves all the support she can get. Or handle, really. When many countries combine their attention, it can be another kind of overwhelming horror.

Doaa’s story reminds us how fragile is our careful calm construction of a life, and how easily it can be disrupted through no fault of our own. I recognize Doaa’s insistence that her destination be Sweden, despite Greece offering her a stipend and citizenship. Sweden was the original goal, and the confusion she, all alone, must have felt when all her constraints suddenly fell away must have been monumental. Now that she has many choices, instead of one uncertain one, which should she choose? Fleming’s retelling of Doaa’s options allows us to feel those uncertainties along with her.

During all Doaa went through, she must have asked herself repeatedly if in fact she and Bessem really had “no choice” but to attempt a migrant illegal crossing. As sorry as I am for what their situation was in Egypt, I would have to conclude that in fact, it was their hope for a better, more prosperous existence with more opportunity that led them to attempt the crossing, not once but three times.

They had a choice. After all, their parents and family stayed in Egypt. I understand conditions were bad in Egypt. I understand they had limited understanding of what went on outside their circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. But I am not sure they have the right to attempt to move to another country just because they want what that country offers its citizens.

What reasonable people must ask themselves is how they can help communities torn apart by war or natural disaster. This kind of migration is humanity’s problem. It doesn’t have to be as deadly as it is at the moment. There may be solutions that address the root issues and do not require the kind of dangerous, deadly journey that Doaa passed through. In some ways her story tells of a kind of grim lottery. If one makes it through the gantlet of death, all kinds of benefits are bestowed upon one.

That viewpoint, however, doesn’t take into account Doaa’s personal bravery to engage the world in this critical conversation about the best way to pursue one’s dreams. I’m quite sure she would rather have not gone through that horror, but sometimes we have…no choice.

Doaa's story was translated twice, from Arabic to Greek and from Greek to English, before it became this book. This fact lends a little distance to the narrative that one must overcome to get at the real experience of this woman and millions like her. The really difficult task of organizing the material fell to Melissa Fleming, and of asking questions that readers like us wanted to know.

I was especially grateful for her including things someone speaking of their own experience may not have included, e.g., what was the composition of the migrants on the boat, their ages and country of origin, who were the ones who rammed the boat (we never learned who they were, but their manner and words were included), the manner the ship went down, and all her time in Egypt, information which was supplemented by interviews with Doaa's mother and sisters. Doaa probably couldn't have done that on her own so soon after her ordeal.



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Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander

Hardcover, 272 pages Expected publication: Sept 5th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9781524732738

Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall.

Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle the state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths?

The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love.

During eight years of that twelve year-period 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone was willing to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further.

The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with few degrees of separation. Most appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made.

In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers.

Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been.

A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love.

I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel (7 hours). Below please find an NPR Scott Simon interview with Nathan Englander about this latest novel:




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City on a Hilltop by Sara Yael Hirschhorn

Hardcover, 340 pages Pub May 22nd 2017 by Harvard Univ Press ISBN13: 9780674975057

For the past couple of years a Goodreads friend, David, and I have had a running commentary on liberal and conservative views on issues at home and abroad. One of these issues concerned the rightness or fairness of Israeli settlements on disputed land, now called the Occupied Territories. The settlements have been pronounced illegal by the United Nations, but settlers continue to develop that seized land, claiming some religious right to it that legally they do not possess.

This title just published by Harvard University Press describes how a disproportionately large number the original settlers in these disputed areas were in fact American Jews, middle-class, educated, left-leaning Democrats. This was startling information to me. Although my perception of the liberality or conservatism of America Jews has been shifting with the times, I never expected that essentially left-leaning liberals from the 1960s U.S. would become the symbol of what appears to be now essentially oppressive, entrenched right-wing privilege.

Hirschhorn is clearly seeking answers to that very conundrum herself, and very carefully unpicks the origins of several settlements with an academic’s detailed forensics. What she finds is a kind of pioneering energy and fighting spirit, but also a kind of selective deafness and willful delusion. Each settlement came at a different time for a different reason, but those who chose to live on undeveloped “empty” land had their own impetus and intention, mixing up their defense of Judaism with a distinctly American notion of manifest destiny.

Citing a 1984 empirical study of American Israelis in Judea and Samaria by Chaim Waxman, Hirschhorn tells us that though many emigrating settlers in the 1960s considered themselves left liberals, the majority felt “Blacks in America have gone too far in their demands.” So maybe these individuals were not as liberal as they considered themselves, but under the surface were deeply conservative. The pioneering aspect of making settlements was so reminiscent of America’s founding that individuals felt some connection to debates about values that occurred at that time. It is worth noting that native Israelis felt American settlers were racist, even fascist.

Hirschhorn highlights Sandy Susan at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, and Miriam Levinger at Hebron to illustrate the intensity with which they struggled through the early days of deprivation and camaraderie. The Levingers were so sure they were entitled to the land “We see ourselves in a link in the chain of return…this site is biblical…we are sovereign…[in the Middle East] there’s no such thing as compromise.” Settlers often opposed the Oslo peace process which would return disputed territories to the Palestinians and as a result were often at the center of a cycle of violence.

The Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Brooklyn played an important role recruiting for a new camp at Efrat, which today is a high-middle class municipality composed of families whose adults often work in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Riskin had trouble finding a job in Israel, despite great success in growing his synagogue in New York, and when approached about establishing a new settlement in Israel, he did not hesitate. He believed the whole land of Israel belongs to the Jews, but that “It’s very important, very, very important” that the land be unclaimed. While in later interviews Riskin says the land of Efrat was “completely empty,” contention and resentment dogs the gated settlement which has seen terrible violence.

The point is that thirty years ago there were dirt roads and pioneers who thought they were doing something difficult but worthwhile. Now the municipality is no longer temporary and is instead considered prosperous and even a little luxurious. It is normalized, and no longer something that one can be imagine giving up. Hirschhorn suggests Riskin paid lip service to “talking to everyone” and “every nation requires independence,” as he gradually crept rightward in his politics and religious teachings. In her conclusions, Hirschhorn suggests we can view American Jews in Israel within the larger category "Americans abroad:" liberal at home, illiberal abroad. The reality on the ground, they claim, changed them.

Efrat was a center of opposition to the Oslo peace accords because, in the words of native Israel settlers

“Efrat has a large number of Anglo-Saxons…who understand democracy. They understand civil disobedience. They understand that the citizen has certain rights that can’t be trampled on…[they had] the fury of moderates who feel that they are betrayed [and the land taken away].”

So, here is that basic contradiction that Hirschhorn set out to unravel. “Rights” and “freedom” are two words that have different meanings depending on the context. Though Americans used to think those words applied to all within its borders, the camp settlers had narrowed that meaning to exclude Palestinians, just as today in America certain far-right groups believe their “rights” cannot be abridged but they are not so sure about the rights of brown-skinned citizens.

“Americans…we just ran life in Tekoa,” a settler said of the settlement in the West Bank. “Living here reminds me of what America was like two hundred years ago. Here you have the spirit of just starting, of being a pioneer.” Except that one isn’t just starting. There is history to contend with, land rights, and Palestinians, who are growing increasingly agitated.

“It was clear from the origins of Tekoa that its Jewish-American founders and Palestinians rights did not have coinciding interests when it came to the land. Tekoa’s leaders did not—and do not—recognize Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank, nor do they honor local territorial claims to their settlement or its surroundings. However, evoking their U.S. heritage, many American-Israelis in the settlements do envision a hierarchy of citizenship rights [emphasis my own], especially if Israeli sovereignty is extended to the West Bank…[West Bank] Arabs must have personal rights—due process, even voting and representation if this comes with duties like some form of [nonmilitary] national service.”

Hirschhorn shows us what led individuals and groups to cross the Atlantic and shows us how, despite their claims to democracy, freedom, and fairness, they have exhibited something less than those ideals, sometimes far less.



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Catch the Jew! by Tuvia Tenenbom

Paperback, 467 pages Pub February 1st 2015 by Gefen Publishing House (first pub August 1st 2014) ISBN13: 9789652297983

Tenenbom is Jewish, Israeli in fact, and though to this time he had “carried no flag for any country,” at the end of this book he finds himself holding a Palestinian flag in a group of stone-throwing demonstrators in Bil’in, being filmed by European television and documentary crews. It hadn’t been Tenenbom’s idea to be a part of the show, but since traveling around Israel for some months claiming he was Abu Ali the German or Tobi the German journalist, he’d been invited to this celebration of Palestinian Independence Day, all staged for the benefit of the cameras and their international audience. In Tenenbom’s view, finding himself in this position was the height of absurdity.

Tenenbom went to Israel in 2013 at the request of his publisher. His earlier book, I Sleep in Hitler's Room: An American Jew Visits Germany, about a six-month walking tour of Germany, appears to be a critique of European attitudes towards Jewishness, and became an international bestseller. Tenenbom had been born ultra-Orthodox in Israel from a long line of European rabbis. He was groomed himself to follow that path until as a young man, he moved to the United States and to pursue higher degrees in mathematics and literature. For thirty-three years he pursued a career as journalist and columnist for media outlets in the U.S. and Germany, and as playwright in the Jewish Theatre of New York, which he founded and manages with his wife Isi. His role as journalist, playwright, and failed rabbi gave him the perfect platform to ask probing questions about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, and Tenenbom took advantage.

His playful yet incisive questioning and manner allowed him to re-state and re-frame arguments in which sides have been drawn for some time, giving us another angle from which to view the action. This book about a several-month stay in Israel in 2013-24 begins light-heartedly enough, laughing along with the little deceptions of both sides in the Israel/Palestinian debate, feeling a sense of camaraderie, appetite, and deep joy at spending time again in the Middle East.

The longer he stays, however, the more Tenenbom sees traps for the Jewish state in the language Israelis and Palestinians use when describing the actions and positions of each side. There is a huge under-informed army of NGOs and Christian religious organizations that have developed very effective propaganda tools to support the Palestinian cause at the expense of the Jewish state. Tenenbom can see it is big business and grows more distressed when Jewish newspapermen like Gideon Levy writing for Haaretz does not ask better, more thorough questions and instead seems to accept the self-flagellating viewpoint that Israelis are racist.

By the end of the volume Tenenbom is losing his sense of humor about Jews he calls “self-hating” who are not pressing hard enough in their self-examination about what is expected of them, or keeping their minds nimble and open to the realities of the situation. The Palestinians may be milking the “conflict” for all it’s worth, but some of the truly needy are being overlooked in the rush to help the more polished actors. Pay attention we can hear him say in subtext. Stay skeptical.

Tenenbom is very persuasive, and very likable: he has an earthy, warm, and intimate way of pointing to our similarities rather than our differences. It is when he meets a uncompromising right-wing settler who insists on his right to burn the Palestinian olive trees because he is “at war” that Tenenbom’s attitude receives its most damning blow. Tenenbom says the man sounds like a Goy, like any other non-Jewish farmer he’d known, not like a normal Jew.

"Personally, I hardly get to meet conviction-driven Jews, say-what-I-think Jews, farming Jews, if-you-slap-me-on-one-cheek-I’ll-slap-you-on-both-cheeks Jews. The Jews I know are neurotic Jews, weak Jews, self-hating Jews, hate-filled-narcissist Jews, accept-every-blame Jews, bowing to all non-Jews Jews, ever guilt-ridden Jews, ugly-looking Jews, big-nosed and hunch-backed Jews, cold Jews, brainy Jews, yapping Jews, and here-are-both-my-cheeks-and-you-can-slap-them-both Jews.

To me, the biggest proof that Jesus was Jewish is this: Who else, but a Jew, could come up with this statement: ‘If someone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other one as well’?"

If your convictions haven’t been shaken up in awhile, Tenenbom stands ready to help out. He is funny, and those who appreciate self-deprecation will have an easier time of it. His extra layer of thoughtfulness rearranges the Middle East so that we must go back through our understanding and look again, do more work on examining how the ground game has changed since the last time we looked. At the end we may not agree that Europeans, Americans and Palestinians can exhibit anti-Semitism commonly and regularly, but he will have us looking closely, to make sure. What he is saying is that Jews are really just like anyone else—no better but certainly no worse—and any attempt to categorize them or assign a ‘national character’ is specious.

This enormously interesting book makes immoderate readers of us. Tenenbom is someone we’d like to encounter again. He makes us think, he makes us laugh, and he seems a perfectly ethical sort. His book is divided into chapters called "gates." Those familiar with the Torah will know of the Fifty Gates of Wisdom or the Fifty Gates of Understanding. Well, Tenenbom has fifty-five gates, but the idea is the same: "Being worthy of receiving prophecy requires character improvement." The thing is, Tenenbom is not optimistic about Israel's longevity in the world. Poor leadership, perhaps, and I agree.

Tenenbom has written a new book on travels around the United States in the lead up to the last election, called The Lies They Tell, just published March 2017.



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Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle

Hardcover, 336 pages Pub April 24th 2012 by Drawn and Quarterly (first published November 16th 2011) Orig Title Chroniques de Jérusalem ISBN13: 9781770460713 Edition Literary Awards Prix du Festival d'Angoulême for Fauve d’or du meilleur album (2012)

This is an appropriate time to take another look at Jerusalem, and Guy Delisle’s book can explain to you the in and outs of what U.S. President Trump is seeing while he is visiting.

Guy Delisle is a graphic artist who accompanies his wife, a Médecins Sans Frontières physician, to hotspots around the world. While in the past he has been able to work as an artist while overseas on assignment, every posting is different, and the one in Jerusalem did not lend itself as easily to sketching outside, teaching in universities, giving shows on his work, and concentrating on finishing his drawings in a systematic way.

The very thing that makes Delisle effective in his role as graphic artist and stay-at-home husband and dad also makes him a frustrating on-the-ground observer. He is almost resolutely non-partisan and non-political. When bombs start to fly in Operation Cast Lead over the holiday period Dec 27, 2008-January 16, 2009 he tells what he heard from his position at home, but he wasn’t interested in being an observer. He also wasn’t interested in interviewing settlers in Hebron when he was asked to do graphic reportage there.

By the end, however, I could see the value in his distanced, uninvolved view. He drew what he observed, without much editorializing. He drew the extreme care some security guards took in checkpoint and airport security work, the difficulties Palestinians had in getting around, working, living, and planning for the future, he drew the wall, and the pushing Palestinians out of their homes by settlers in the West Bank.

Delisle saw the sights Jerusalem had to offer, always on the lookout for interesting or peaceful places to bring his wife and children, or somewhere he could work uninterrupted. Eight months into a twelve-month tour, the pastor of the Lutheran church Augusta Victoria, on the Mount of Olives, offered Delisle a room in which to work. It was quiet and the only distractions were Delisle’s own thoughts, and a large organ which sent vibrations through his space. He found that he’d accustomed himself to grabbing the in-between moments in his hectic daily life, and the peacefulness of the church was made it more difficult for him to complete his projects, paradoxically.

Delisle spent many frames drawing the wall: “It’s graphically interesting,” he would explain. The wall through Jerusalem cut Palestinians off, in some cases, from their school, from their work, from their own land. What I particularly liked was his dividing the chapters by months of the year. Some months had considerable drama, but others reflected his dawning understanding about the situation and his learning to make up his own mind about what might be excusable behavior and what seemed like taking advantage.

Throughout the mostly black-and-white book, a map of Israel with the West Bank and Gaza drawn in chartreuse served to remind Delisle and readers that the amount of space allocated to Palestinians in Israel is very small, and Israeli settlers are pushing them away even still. The violent tactics and language the settlers use, the virulent criticism heaped upon the government and activists by the press, can be shocking to those of us who are not used to such extreme positions. “The vast majority of Israelis vigorously disapprove of the extreme behavior of the Hebron settlers.” It is hard not to respond with derision to statements like these, and it is hard to see that restraint is working to underline the urgency of the situation for Palestinians.

The currents of daily life are portrayed effectively by the end of this thick graphic novel (336 pages), and Delisle’s tone and lack of interest serve his purposes well. Despite his occasional missteps (when discussing Hasidic Jews, for instance), his intentional ignorance gives us and him the opportunity to look at the situation anew.

I ended up ordering Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and also his book Burma Chronicles. He has another, called Hostage, which debuted in English in 2017, translated from the French. Hostage tells the story of MSF employee Christophe André, who was captured in Russia’s North Caucasus in 1997 until he managed to escape months later. Public Radio International has a description here. From that link, we learn

”And the truly surprising end of the story is this: Just six months after he escaped, André showed up at Doctors Without Borders and asked for a new assignment. He stayed on with them for another 20 years.”

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Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story by Ari Folman & David Polonsky

Paperback, 128 pages Pub February 17th 2009 by Metropolitan Books (first published 2008) ISBN13: 9780805088922

The 2008 animated documentary of the same name by Ari Folman and David Polonsky took four years to complete. The frames of this graphic novel may have come from the film itself, and the sense of the film is uncannily captured without the sound or movement. Both book and film are so powerful I could not make it through in one sitting. A tremendous sense of anxiety and foreboding is generated by white/brown/black monochrome washed with an acid, chemical yellow, the slavering wild dogs, and the dissociative reality of war on a beach.

For anyone who hasn’t seen this film or read the graphic novel, I urge you to put aside anything else you have on your plates the minute you obtain a copy of either. It probably won’t take more than an evening to read/watch this remarkable act of witnessing, and you will remember it for the rest of your lives. Folman was a nineteen-year old recruit in the Israeli army when he was sent to Lebanon in 1982 to stop PLO rocket attacks and to retaliate for an assassination attempt on the life of Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom.

At the time, many displaced Palestinians were living in refugee camps in southern Lebanon in permanent structures like houses. Their lives did not look temporary, but there was always agitation because their refugee status did not change. In Lebanon, the sectarian Christian leader Bashir Gemayel aggressively challenged (some might say crushed) the rights of Palestinians and Muslims, and shortly after he became president-elect in the 1982 presidential election in Lebanon, he was assassinated.

Gemayel’s party, the Christian Phalangists, took their revenge on two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. Israeli forces were slow to recognize and respond to an unfolding massacre. It appears they simply did not recognize the evil for what it was--it was too monstrous. The scars of those days left many men unable to understand what had actually happened in September 1982 and their role in it. Forman and Polonsky managed to show us that paralysis that comes over someone, even a group, when something bad is happening. The men protested up to their leaders, but not loudly, confidently, definitively enough. This phenomenon is not unknown. It may even have happened to us.

Much of the story is about the elusive nature of memory, and what scars the trauma of war leaves. The authors decided not to try and give voice to the other participants in this extraordinary event, but to just focus on the point of view of someone who was there but not directly implicated in the killing and who retained no memory of the time. We can forget these times of trauma, which is why the Holocaust is constantly referred to and memorialized. One must remember in order to forestall similar atrocities in the future.

The art in the film and the book is exceptional for its originality. The drawings are a certain kind of primitive and for that reason are all that we can project onto them. It may be the horror is something we bring because objectively speaking, until real photographs appear at the very end, events are only hinted at: we have the blank stares of the affected soldiers and the bizarrely horrible sudden deaths of soldiers playing on a beach—and this all from the point of view of what might be called the Israeli bystanders.

They were part of the army, and they had ordnance, but they had little passion for battle, the Israeli participants. The Phalangists were the actors in this case. I am reminded of Montaigne: "There is no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility." The whole record of the movie and the book should go down with oral histories of ancient battles not at all heroic but horrible and instructive and something forever to be avoided.

After making this film, Ari Folman said he no longer has interest in traditional filmmaking. There was something even more exciting to him about the art of David Polonsky, who tried using his non-dominant hand to draw so that the smoothness of caricatures did not distract from the roughness of the subject matter. Animation was a relatively new industry in Israel when they began, and since they had no infrastructure, they made decisions that more practiced and wealthier studios may not have made.

Both the film and the graphic novel are for grown-ups, or for people who want to be grown-ups.



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Judas by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange

Hardcover, 320 pages Pub Nov 8th 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published August 2014) ISBN13: 9780544464049 Literary Awards – Haus der Kulturen der Welt for Mirjam Pressler (2015), Man Booker Int'l Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2017)

This is the third outstanding work I’ve read by an Israeli in as many weeks, and I find myself falling under a spell of admiration again for a culture that fights back against the worst aspects of itself, interrogates itself relentlessly, and creates humor around the morose recognition of man’s fallibility. Into a novel describing three generations living together in a small Jerusalem house, Amos Oz weaves history, religion, and politics into a meditation on the why and how of Jewishness and the concept of a Jewish state.

Not for a moment do we believe the characters have a life beyond that of describing a conflict. The generous nature of Oz’s characters make us willing to suspend judgment and place our trust in his hands awhile, to hear what he has to say. In our modern world one is rarely willing or able to hear an opposite view, but this seems a safe place to examine ideas. In a review in the New York Times, Oz speaks of this novel as a piece of chamber music. A grouping of voices influence one another, each different than the other, three generations of Jews in Israel.

The time is late 1950s or early 1960s. A student Shmuel has found his thesis, “Jewish Views of Jesus,” not as unique as he’d imagined and less interesting than something he'd bumped up against in research: “Christian Views of Judas.” Shmuel discovers that without the traitor Judas Iscariot, there would be no Christianity. Jesus and his apostles were all Jews. Without the crucifixion, there may not have been a rift in beliefs.

Needing to ponder this theory further, Shmuel has left his thesis unfinished and has taken a job as evening companion to learned old Gershom Wald in exchange for room and board. The old man spends his days arguing vociferously on the telephone with friends and enemies, and is a strong supporter of David ben-Gurion’s Zionism. Wald’s daughter-in-law Aitalia holds an opposite and more radical view that reflects her own father, Shealtiel Abravanel’s opinion that the concept of nation states and ownership of land and resources is a faulty one.

"Aitalia’s father was one of those people who believe that every conflict is merely a misunderstanding: a spot of family counseling, and handful of group therapy, a drop or two of goodwill, and at once we shall all be brothers in heart and soul and the conflict will disappear. He was one of those people convinced that all that is required to resolve a conflict is for both parties to get to know each other, and immediately they will start to like each other…"

The novel is a multi-layered examination of the idea of ‘traitor,’ and whether or not it is, in fact, an enlightened state “which really ought to be seen as a badge of honor:”

"Anyone willing to change," Shmuel said, "will always be considered a traitor by those who cannot change and are scared to death of change and don't understand it and loathe change…"
……Shmuel added in a hushed voice, as though afraid that strangers might hear: "After all, the kiss of Judas, the most famous kiss in history was surely not a traitor’s kiss…"

But old man Wald reminds us that it is the name Judas which has become a synonym for betrayal, and perhaps also a synonym for Jew.

"Millions of simple Christians think that every single Jew is infected with the virus of treachery…So long as each Christian baby learns with its mother’s milk that God-killers still tread the earth, or the offspring of God-killers, we [Jews] shall know no rest."

In a review for Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir Arab of the Future, I’d expressed some concern that Arab schoolchildren in the Middle East were learning religious hatreds early, never considering that North American Christians were of course learning religious hatreds at the same age.

Oz makes no secret of his own opinions in interviews, but in this work he makes us puzzle it all out. He gives us the old conundrums in new ways, making us want to take them up again for examination. We question everything from the ground up. This work reminds me why I love literature: Oz is able to layer complex motivations onto history and take a stab at trying to explain what man is and what we should expect of him.

The translation of this work into English by Nicholas de Lange from the Hebrew is especially easy to enjoy. The Blackstone audio production is excellent, the work narrated on ten discs (11 hours) by Jonathan Davis. The hardcover published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is useful to return to some ideas. Though the novel is not difficult to read, the ideas challenge readers and may require a second or third look to tie the threads together. This is great stuff. Oz is seventy-seven years old. He should be proud of himself, and we should be grateful.



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A Question of Order by Basharat Peer

Paperback, 160 pages Expected pub: March 21st 2017 by Columbia Global Reports ISBN13: 9780997126426

When I first picked up this title I imagined it would pull back from the detail and micro-angle on nationalist movements cropping up around the world and draw some larger conclusions. It doesn't get that far, but it does raise the questions. Peer gives a detailed timeline of events that led to the embrace of the authoritarian leaders in India (Narenda Modi) and Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdogan).

Author Bashir Peer points out that those two countries are not alone, and names Russia (Vladimir Putin), Egypt (Abdel Fatteh ed-Sisi), Hungary (Viktor Mihály Orbán), Chad (Idriss Déby) Belarus (Alexander Lukashenko), Cambodia (Hun Sen), Singapore (Lee Hsien Loong). Somewhat oddly, I thought, he pairs Aung San Su Kyi (Myanmar) and Rodrigo Duterte (The Philippines) and names them as illiberal, if not outright autocrats along with Paul Kagame’s (Rwanda) regime, all of which have silenced critical voices, and have not stood up against political and religious persecution. When you look at all those names spread out like that one does have to wonder--what's happening?

What Peer does in this book is follow events that led to the rise of Modi in India, showing his aggression in the suppression of Muslim and Dalit rights. Dalits are India’s lowest caste, and many have benefitted from government attention to their plight in society. However, being admitted to university apparently doesn’t mean Dalits actually have professors willing to mentor them or recommend them or promote their work, somewhat reminiscent of oppressed classes in any society attempting to take advantage of their legal rights. Modi began his political career working for a Hindu supremacist organization.

What may seem remarkable about Modi’s rise was his support from the intellectual, overseas-educated, and business elite. Not so strange when you think that “inequality in India is now growing at a faster rate than in other developing countries like China, Brazil, and Russia.” His biggest electoral challenges were traditional opposition of lower and middle castes to his party, which he managed to overcome with a robust twitter and get-out-the-vote campaign. After he won as prime minister in 2014, he talked a good game about putting caste and religious divisions away but was unable to prevent the country’s descent into violence the following year, probably because he was unwilling to act against this party.

“Modi’s victory in 2014 had legitimized hate speech and physical aggression against real and perceived opponents. Words that couldn’t be uttered at the dinner table were blared in the public sphere.”

It might be worth noting some barely-there shadow outlines of a comparison forming between Modi and Trump. It is worth noting what made Modi popular, how he sustained that popularity, and how quickly taboos against hate talk and violence evaporated.

In Turkey, the period of instability Peer describes starts a little earlier, in 2006. Erdogan took over in 2003 and pushed democratic reforms to make Turkey appealing to the European Union, and trying to lessen tensions with its Kurdish minority through negotiations. Healthcare, affordable housing, and infrastructure improved, but it was the loosening of the non-secularist creed, expanding collective bargaining rights, increasing welfare provisions for children, the disabled, and the elderly and allowing Muslims with headscarves into the governing body that had long banned them. Erdogan was loosening the control of the Kemalist military.

The July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey is covered in great detail, and Peer discusses the Muslim preacher Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, the cleric living in Pennsylvania in the U.S. who, once an ally of Erdogan, opposed to his rapprochement with the Kurds. Gülen’s very powerful group with tentacles worldwide--and especially in the Turkish police--was supposedly responsible for the coup attempt, or was blamed for it, in any case. The detail here is rather more than I was expecting, and less at the same time. I could be interested, but somehow connecting threads were missing in this discussion and I got lost in the details. For someone seeking details, however, this is a good view.

This is not a long book but I had a hard time getting a grip on this material and wished it had a greater amount of overview or boldface marking what we are meant to take away. Neither of these countries are my area of expertise, but it was difficult to pick out a few big ideas. It may be a better read for someone that already has a basic understanding of the culture and government in these two countries to take advantage of Peer’s providing the timeline of conflict for the past couple of years.

One country's specific experiences are probably not going to be immediately relevant to a worldwide theory. One would have to pick and choose details and immediately then one's conclusions become suspect. Authoritarian regimes are nothing new. The author needs to remind us why this moment is different.



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The Syrian Jihad by Charles R. Lister

Paperback, 500 pages Published February 1st 2016 by Oxford University Press, USA ISBN 0190462477 (ISBN13: 9780190462475)

Writing about a moving target is very difficult, but this is the most detailed look at the Syrian crisis that I have seen. Published in early 2016, this work discusses events from 2011 up to September of 2015. Charles Lister has fantastic access as scholar and advisor with Brookings Institute, and not all this material is easily available in innumerable newspaper reports. He spent four years researching and writing about the incredibly complex fighting environment in Syria:

"By early 2015 at least 150,000 insurgents within as many as 1,500 operationally distinct armed groups were involved in differing levels of fighting across Syria…"

Lister has a point of view—that is, he wished the West were more involved in offering opportunities for cooperation with groups resisting Assad, so that legitimate challenges to the regime might have had more thrust. He points out that, unfortunately, Western airstrikes beginning in 2014 had the effect of

"definitively creating a new international enemy in the eyes of IS and Jabhar al-Nusra—both of which had previously been focused solely on the local conflicts in Syria and Iraq."

True or not, it seems reasonable that ISIS in 2014 had no intention of taking on the entire Western world, but were forced into it regardless. It is hard to remember how much we knew at the time, but for perspective, consider that the Jordanian air pilot, Al-Kasasbeh, was murdered on film in January 2014, beginning an avalanche of responses from surrounding countries.

I skimmed parts of this; it is an extremely dense discussion with a huge amount of information. Unless one is intimately involved in making decisions about the area, it is probably too detailed, and not for the general reader. But events you may have heard about are often discussed here in great detail, with underlying imperatives and aftermaths. I was looking for Lister’s take on 2014-2015 events, and gleaned enough to know what to look for elsewhere in the future.

For years, and especially in the past 12 months I’d been hearing BBC World TV and radio hosts rant on about Obama’s lack of direct military intervention and I was wondering where this view was coming from. Lister is/was a strong advocate for the U.N. resolution “Responsibility to Protect” and felt Western countries were conveniently focusing on “terrorism” in Syria as a way to avoid staring at the real problem: Bashir al Assad. It appears Lister was of the opinion that Assad should have been neutralized, and then local resistance fighters could have protected Syria from ISIS. Obviously this is an argument that can go round and round, and we have so many recent examples of such interventions being the wrong thing.

Very interesting stuff here about Iran’s involvement protecting their strategic interests; Russia doing the same. In fact, as the fighting in the east dragged on in 2015, Iran was apparently negotiating directly with resistance fighters in some areas, with no Syrian government representatives at all. Resistance fighters at the same time felt abandoned by the West, will fight Assad to the death, and therefore are aligning or considering aligning with more radical elements, including ISIS-affiliates, to stay in the fight. Which is one reason why this book is called The Syrian Jihad, and not, say, The Syrian Insurgency or The Syrian War. Not a good development.

Lister doesn’t see the Syrian jihad collapsing any time soon, no matter what news is coming out of the U.S. military.



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The Arab of the Future, Part 2 by Riad Sattouf, translated by Sam Taylor

Volume II is a continuation of the adventures of Riad as a young French-Arab in Homs in the mid-1980s. Riad is still a child, blond-haired and six years old. He is ready to go to school for the first time, and is terrified. With good reason, it turns out.

Sattouf positively outdoes himself drawing scenes from the classroom. The headscarf-wearing teacher has a skirt so short and legs so large that our eyes widen in fear. Riad takes a frame to zero in on the impossible narrowness of her high heels, her calves looming dense and heavy above, like a boulder snagged over a walkway. She looks dangerous. That is to say nothing of the smile she holds a second before she strikes the boys on the palms with a wooden rod. Nothing so thin as a ruler, her tool is a rod that looks very solid and hard in her hand.

"Ha, ha, [Riad’s father chortles that evening] you’re funny. You’re just like me at your age. Scared of everything…Don’t worry, nothing will happen."

More false words were never spoken. Lots happens, and much of it is life-threatening. But perhaps most importantly we see the utter cruelty with which people treat one another. If there was ever a time to be grateful for political correctness in our daily interactions, after reading this you will breathe a sigh of relief for those tedious niceties. You will remember the menace of schoolyard bullies, and realize Arab society, in Syria at least, is taught this is normal human behavior: to be admired if you win, killed if you do not.

Sattouf takes his time with this installment of the story of young Riad. We spend a couple of days sampling the coursework in first grade: patriotic songs, basic characters for writing, reading skills without comprehension, and inventive slurs and punishments. We meet the neighbors: a police-chief-cousin whose stash of gold jewelry could finance a bank, and whose home is a huge unfinished concrete pile cratered with moisture-seeping cracks. We go on a day trip to Palmyra with a general while Riad’s father spends his time trying to wrangle the general into “putting in a word” for his advancement at the university where he works. Palmyra is littered with ancient-looking pottery shards which Riad’s father disdains.

"In the third century after Jesus Christ [Riad’s father says dully, lighting a cigarette] Zenobia turned the nomad’s city of Palmyra into an influential artistic center."

Riad returns to France and enjoys it at the same time he begins to realize he is changing…has changed. He is a desert child now, confused with the plenty that surrounds him in France. It is a poignant section we all recognize for its dislocation. He does not read or speak French particularly well. The French language is difficult, and complicated. Where does Riad fit in? Where does he belong? Where will he be accepted?

The scenes of RIad with the men in his community when he returns to Homs are memorable. Very little is said; the drawings do the work here. I did not understand all that was implied, but someone will. Perhaps the punchline will be revealed in another installation of the life of Riad in Syria. Riad’s father is becoming more and more unbearable as a husband, as a father, as a man. He is hopelessly out of his league wherever he is, and always aspirational, never in control. His wife is losing patience, and he himself is recognizing a few hard truths that have him sitting by himself in some frames, smoking and silent.

Sattouf leaves us feeling unsettled and unsure. Do we want Riad in this place with these people? I think his mother is feeling similarly unsure. The father…one gets the sense that however much the father thinks he is the man, there is precious little he does control.

This installment just cements my sense that this kind of graphic novel may be the easiest, most immediate, most fun way to learn about a culture. When it is done well, a boatload of information can be transmitted in a couple of frames. Sattouf appears to be completely frank about life in Homs as he sees it, and it is remarkable for its insights as well as its humor.

I love this series and will insist upon reading everything about Riad growing up. The Tintin series was the first set of books Riad had access to, the series being only one of two books his academic father had in his personal library. The other book was the Quran. Will look to see if I can see the influences from Tintin in Sattouf’s marvelous story of growing up Arab before his third book hits the stands.

The terrific translation of this work is done by Sam Taylor, and the U.S. publisher is Metropolitan Books, a division of Henry Holt.

Paperback, 160 pages. Published September 20th 2016 by Metropolitan Books (first published June 11th 2015) Original TitleL'Arabe du futur 2 : Une jeunesse au Moyen-Orient (1984-1985) ISBN 1627793518 (ISBN13: 9781627793513)




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The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

This novel contains so much naked yearning, sadness, despair, and exhausted hilarity—poking fun at man’s powerlessness in the hands of Satan and Death accompanied by Angels—that we could be forgiven for imagining it a memoir. Alameddine has given us something rich upon which to sup, slowly, for there is much to assimilate. A poor Arab son of a whore (literally, as it turns out) is intellectually realized by nuns and priests in Beirut, schooling paid for by an absent father.

The boy and his schoolmates discover his gayness early, and the rest of his life is nary a denial, only acceptance, and once he found his circle, a verbally rich and figuratively celebratory consummation. Consumption is the other half of the story, the harvesting of lives, the dropping away of the circle. Alameddine does not shrink from the most revealing descriptions of life, love, and death in the life of a "little brown gay" man, just giving us pieces sometimes, as though he can’t remember clearly. He probably can’t, which is how we get the feeling that this is something remembered rather than merely invented.

This is not an easy read, there is so much thoughtful erudition here. Our eyes take in more than our brains can process. References to earlier works are everywhere apparent, some boldly proclaimed—Mikhail Bulgakov, Goethe, the Bible, the Quran—others we see faint outlines of in the swirl of colors and language that comprise invention, memory, and forgetting. This is a novel unlike any other, for that little brown gay Arab has given us something we have not seen before, all beauty and crescendo and wit and the most unbearable sense of loss. This is a revealing, naked novel that expresses a longing for acceptance, despair of a kindly world, and a stunning reversal—that hoarse, defiant shout, drenched in a kind of mad joy, into the void.

The novel opens with Satan having a conversation with Death. Shortly we learn that the man they came to discuss, Jacob, has signed himself into a mental hospital…to check his despair. The man, the little brown gay Arab, had lost many friends to AIDS in the scourge. He wants both to forget and to remember. It is not just his life he must remember, but all of it. All of his history, starting with his Yemeni blood. Satan tells us “forgetting is as integral to memory as death is to life.” It is not immediately obvious why we need to know this, and we are not sure we understand it anyway. We will forget it, and remember it again and again.

"Yemen is one of my favorite places, [said Death]...That nation has refreshed and rejuvenated me for centuries."

Love between partners is a momentous thing, not easily found and not easily lost. It lasts forever, some believe, or its vestiges linger forever. It leaves a mark. One is not supposed to lose one’s partner to death in mid-life. It is cruel. It is unnatural. This is the place where Jacob finds himself, struggling through a life filled with losses since childhood. Now in adulthood, he should be expert at it. And there is some resilience there that we poke and prod with interest. How will Jacob respond to his challenges?

”As it was in the beginning, said Satan, lying on my bed, so shall it be in the end, so shall it be first, last, midst, and without end, basically you’re screwed, Jacob, you know, the supremacy of Western civilization is based entirely on the ability to kill people from a distance….You can never win, Jacob.”

Death, on the other hand, promises peace, lethe, forgetfulness, and silence. “Peace on demand, instant gratification.” Which will our confused and suffering Jacob choose? His answer is foreshadowed throughout the novel and has something to do with his covering angels. Despair is normal, despite Jacob’s need for a psych ward. Despair is what we get, sometimes. Forgetting and remembering…you can’t have one without the other.

One early memory is Jacob envying his older cousin, a schoolgirl who faced life silently, in a beige school uniform. Jacob tells us “My Halloween costume that years [was] a headscarf with two pink pigtails sprouting out of it…”

An interview with Rabih Alameddine gives some notion of his carefully hidden depths. This link has the conversation recorded in a noisy cafe. I prefer it, though there is also a written transcript. It is a messy, imperfect thing, this interview, but Alameddine is just so irrepressibly himself.



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The Yellow Wind by David Grossman

David Grossman was a novelist when he was commissioned in 1987 to write a series of articles describing his perceptions of conditions in the occupied West Bank at the time of the twentieth anniversary of Israel’s Six Day War. What he wrote became a sensation in Israel. A book of the articles was published. Portions of that book were published in The New Yorker, and translations offered access throughout the world.

My initial reaction upon reading this thirty years since it was written was that it seemed dated. Those of us since who have been willing to grapple with the scene there have encountered stories like these before. The point, I guess, is that the problem has never been resolved and instead has festered, infected, and inflamed an entire region.

Grossman was remarkably naive in his writing—by that I mean he registered his reactions without much apparent editing. When he was horrified and distressed recognizing that Arab children were being taught to hate and kill Jews, he said so. When he discovered he lacked remorse when an Arab’s family home was torn down and the family banished because the son had committed murder, he said so. “They had raised the son and were therefore responsible” was his logic.

Towards the end of the book, however, his insights came hard and fast and terribly prescient. What strikes me now is how none of his insights were acted upon. All the markers I have in this book are in the last 75 pages. The paragraphs are too long to quote, so you will just have to go to the source. If you have been following the Israel Palestine saga, skim the beginning, and start reading at Chapter 12, “Sumud.” Or just read the last chapter, “The First Twenty Years.”

"The occupation is a continuing and stubborn test for both sides trapped in it…demanding that we…take a stand and make a decision. Or at least relate…Years passed…[and] I found myself developing the same voluntary suspension of questions about ethics and occupation…I have a bad feeling: I am afraid that the current situation will continue exactly as it is for another ten or twenty years. There is one excellent guarantee of that—human idiocy and the desire not to see the approaching danger. But I am sure that the moment will come when we will be forced to do something and it may well be that our position then will be much less favorable than it is now."

No one country has the corner on stupidity and reluctance to see danger. America, Europe, China...every country...has been reluctant to acknowledge climate change when it would have been so much easier to address it than now. None of us can claim to be better. There will always be those among us whose moral anguish or need to respond exceeds that of others. But I begin to think the situation in Israel/Palestine has crushed the souls of most people living there until now there is precious little left to save. Please prove to me is isn't so. Make me proud to know you.

The last paragraph of the book quotes Albert Camus. The passage from speech to moral action has a name: “To become human.”

I was led to this reading by a GR friend whose review made me want to see.


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The Thistle and the Drone by Akbar Ahmed

Ahmed starts out reframing the way the West views the Muslim world. Instead of looking at interactions in the world as a “clash of civilizations,” he posits that we should be looking at the Muslim diaspora as a set of tribal communities in conflict with their central governments. While some may think this is accepted thought already, it certainly was not when we went into Iraq in 1990, nor in 2003. Ahmed makes a compelling case with examples extending from Albania and Turkey to China and Indonesia, highlighting different models of organization and center-periphery relationships that apply throughout this huge area.

Once the framing is stated, it almost seems obvious, which is perhaps the strongest argument for reading this book. Ahmed goes further to explain how the West has exacerbated regional tensions by inserting themselves into this conflict under the aegis of “the war on terror,” and turned the fight into a global affair against westernization and globalization as defined by Tom Friedman. The unintentional “bug splat” of drone strikes, or the civilian deaths coincident with targeted killings of terrorists, means tribal leaders have a moral responsibility to fight back, aligning with whomever has the strength and willingness to see that fight through. As long as the drone strikes and collateral damage continues, the fight will continue.

The author uses the metaphor of the drone to represent Western technology and power and points out that the thistle captures the essence of tribal societies. The thistle is prickly, hardy, and very hard to uproot. It has an unusual beauty, and it roots in poor soil. Long after all is destroyed, the thistle will abound. Ahmed tells us that the West was used in some cases by “central governments who cynically and ruthlessly exploited the war on terror to pursue their own agenda against the periphery.” We know it is true.

”It is in the interest of the United States to understand, in all the tribal societies with which it is engaged, the people, the leadership, history, culture, their relationship with the center, their social structures, and the role Islam plays in their lives, These issues are, in face, the subject matter of anthropology…Without this understanding, the war on terror will not end in any kind of recognizable victory as current military actions and policies are only exacerbating the conflict."

Ahmed has met Presidents Bush and Obama in his role as academic and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Bush’s administration, I felt, was spectacularly wrong because it was imposing a prefabricated frame of different cultures and societies…Obama’s administration was spectacularly unsure…Both administrations were driven by issues almost wholly on a political level, neglecting the moral and social dimensions and their implications.” Ahmed’s insights may be one of the reasons President Obama did not bomb Syria when the conflict began there. But much damage had been and continues to be done to the relationship tribal groups have with the United States. When the U.S. government put human and civil rights to the service of security, any admiration the U.S. had garnered began to erode.

Ahmed is a huge fan of America’s founding fathers, and the U.S. Constitution. He points out that America itself has wrestled with the center-periphery issue itself in dealing with Native American Indians. Benjamin Franklin wrote that Europeans could learn a great deal from tribal societies: when a Native American elder was offered the opportunity to have several of his tribe educated at a local Virginia college, the elder thanked the government and replied:

"Our Ideas of this Kind of Education happen not to be the same with yours…Several of our Young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy, spoke our Language imperfectly; were therefore neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, or Counsellors; they were totally good for nothing… however…if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their Sons, we will take great Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."

The rise of “instant terror experts” that arose in and around the think tanks sprinkling Washington after 9/11 fueled a distorted view of Islam and seeded Islamophobia throughout the U.S., mistakenly defining Islam as the enemy in the global war on terror. Ahmed gives the U.S. Army credit for gaining a greater understanding of the importance of tribal culture as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, but the strategy of working with tribes as a partner came too late: “The United States did not have the time, the resources, or the temperament to create an effective and neutral tribal administration…”

The solution, according to Ahmed, is using the tribal structure and code to repair “mutations into violence:”

"If the tribal code promotes the notion of revenge, then it just as surely advocates the resolution of conflict through a council of elders based on justice and tradition…While the state must express its ideas of nationhood by providing education and other benefits to its peoples, the leaders of the periphery need to encourage their followers to participate in the processes of change and take advantage of them. The state must understand that its components have different customs and traditions, and it needs to acknowledge them, granting communities on the periphery the full rights and privileges enjoyed by its other citizens…however good the intentions on both sides, there is still the matter of how the each sees the other…each side must appreciate the perception the other side has of it.

"...People on periphery have been traumatized beyond imagination in recent years…They face widespread famine and disease and are voiceless and friendless in a hostile world…They have been robbed of their dignity and honor…Yet the world seems indifferent to their suffering and is barely aware of its scale…The test is to see a common humanity in the suffering of others.”

Ahmed is an academic and he writes fulsomely, with many examples and vignettes. The argument is strong and logical enough to be stated simply in a few pages, though, and we quickly recognize the value of this recast of the conflict in which we are embroiled. I really appreciate his taking the time to write his thesis and I come away with a fresh perspective and appreciation of conflict and amity in our world.

This book is Part III of a trilogy examining relations between America and the Muslim world. It is self-contained, however, individuals may find it worthwhile to look at Ahmed's previous work, Journey into Islam and Journey into America. Colonel David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla blurbs praise on the back: "...required reading..."


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The New Threat: The Past, Present, & Future of Islamic Militancy by Jason Burke

If I had one book to give someone interested in understanding ISIS and the threats we now face from Islamic militancy, it would be this one. Published in August 2015, this book includes material through the summer of that year, but also digests and explains some of the earlier reports coming out of Syria, the Middle East, and South Asia. Burke also addresses the threat of home-grown terrorism that is most real to Western communities and governments.

Burke began reporting on events relating to the change in the Islamic character of the Middle East and South Asia as a journalist in the 1990s and he has refined his understanding of the changes in those regions ever since. His grasp is both deep and wide—he wishes he could have included more about the movement in South and Southeast Asia because, in his conclusions at the end, he believes that could be the next area to source individuals committed to jihad.

Burke reiterates over the course of his narrative that terrorism is meant to force leaders to act quickly, make mistakes, and take action they ordinarily would not do, destabilizing their governments. Terror is meant to make individuals disrupt their daily routines, causing follow-on economic repercussions. And terror is meant to cause the populace to polarize: people to question their relationships, fear their neighbors, challenge their government, and consider violence. One might argue terror has already caused irremediable changes in the fabric of world society. Burke replies that we must become resilient, savvy, and knowledgeable. Terrorism in the Middle East may have already run its course, but the seeds are everywhere.

The book is not long, and those of you already well-schooled in the history of ISIS may not feel you need to reread the beginning, though I found Burke’s finesse added a depth to my own understanding of the region, besides being the tightest, clearest history I’ve yet seen. Burke adds to the work done previously by making cogent comment on others’ conclusions. For years I’d been wondering about the families of suicide bombers, their apparent acquiescence causing me to question my own understanding of family ties. Burke addresses this directly:

"Suicide bombing is neither a cheap weapon, as often said, nor the spontaneous, organic expression of the inchoate rage of a people. It is a tactic, adopted for specific strategic reasons by terrorists, and which involves the commitment of significant resources if it is going to be successful. The extremist organizations that pioneered the use of the tactic—such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers—rapidly learned that few communities naturally accept the voluntary death of their teenagers. The individual who becomes a human bomb may cost an organization less than a missile but any militant hoping to reply suicide attackers needs to invest heavily and systematically in propaganda designed to build and then maintain a ‘cult of the martyr’ if they are avoid a backlash from relatives, friends and their wider circle. It is not natural for a mother or a father to celebrate the death of a child, and the idea that young men, or increasingly women, should kill themselves in order to kill others, often civilians, has to be normalized…in practical terms, meanwhile, the families of ‘martyrs’ need to be looked after; funerals organized and paid for, valedictory films produced and broadcast; a dedicated infrastructure to find, isolate and condition ‘martyrs’ set up and run. This effort must be constant and places a considerable strain on a groups’ resources. Many Islamic extremist organizations, including IS, make disproportionate use of foreign volunteers as suicide attackers. One reason may well be to make a powerful statement about the extent of their support around the globe. But another may simply be that foreigners are cheaper."

Burke briefly traces the history and methods of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, their differences and similarities, and their current state of play, including their affiliates around the world. He then discusses the threat to the West, drawing on the most important conclusions of Western analysts regarding what has been called home-grown terror or “lone wolves.” He first focuses on terror incidents in Britain and Europe, which I found particularly enlightening. With regards to America, Burke focuses most intensely on the Marathon Bombers in Boston.

He takes issue with the notion of ‘lone wolf,’ arguing that the similarities of the public statements of those with wearing this label use many of the same words and concepts, implying an underlying global community that extends far beyond their individual actions. “These men were formed, conditioned and prepared for their ultimate acts over years, if not decades, by an entire culture of extremist activism.”

An interesting outcome of the Arab Spring, Burke notes, is that several relatively Westernized pro-democracy activists turned to Islamic militancy when they were disillusioned during the fifty months from 2011 to 2015 when regimes collapsed, governments failed, and the international community did little to stave off deprivation for citizens facing war or displacement. He speaks of the gangland ethos among converts to Islamic militancy, the ‘jihadi cool,’ and 'jihad meets The Sweeney meets the gangsta.’ There is exploitable weakness there, for both the converts and for the main terror group.

In the final chapter on the future of terror, Burke discusses several completely fascinating long-term surveys or polls done in huge swathes of Islamic territory. The U.S.-based Pew Center published one in 2013 which revealed that support for suicide bombing remains limited, concerns about extremism are high, and levels of support for Al Qaeda remain low, but that perceptions of Western society are are increasingly negative, including views of Christians and Jews. On the Western side, we don't need to go further than our newspapers and TV reports to know that perceptions of Muslims are tanking.

Burke’s final chapter is one readers will not want to miss. In it Burke describes the outcomes of this history of terror—the divisions we see in our societies, the retrenchments in rights, the fear, the polarity—despite the relative lack of physical impact of terror on Western communities. “The real impact of Islamic militancy…is in the Islamic world where the monthly death toll frequently exceeds the total in the West over the past decade.” But the West has had costs: by focusing on terror we did not focus on climate change, the relationships between the West and Arab or Islamic populations have become poisonous, and our own communities have divisions that are destroying us from within. How we deal with the threats we face will define us long into the future.

This book has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2016.

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