Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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The idea of disguise is wrapped up in the quest for identity, as the characters struggle to figure out who they are. This is the central idea of the books, tying into the theme of fathers and sons and the idea of espionage obscuring true identities. Stern lives in the shadow of his famous father, and his desire to carve his own niche leads to his belief that he needs to create a homeland in the Levant for people of the three great faiths of the area, an idea that leads him to tragedy at Smyrna, a morphine addiction, and his squalid but heroic death in a Cairo bar. Joe is the last of 33 sons, and half of his brothers die in World War I, while he ends up fighting in the Easter Rebellion. When he arrives in Jerusalem in 1920, he’s already led a full life but one defined by his family and his Irishness, and he spends the next 20-odd years tying to determine who he is – is he a gunrunner for Stern, the lover of Maud and father of Bernini, one of the richest men in Jerusalem, or even the medicine man of the Hopi in Arizona? Cairo Martyr wants revenge on the Mamelukes who raped his grandmother, and he turns that into a quest for vengeance against all Muslims, but he comes to realize that that won’t fulfill him. Munk Szondi doesn’t want to play music like the rest of the men in his family, so he heads to the East from Hungary to find his destiny. The book is full of characters breaking from the traditions of their families or their cultures (or both) – Strongbow, Skanderbeg Wallenstein, Joe, Munk, Menelik Ziwar, Maud, Sivi, Theresa, Bletchley/Bell, Yousef, and Yossi/Halim. For Whittemore, the quest for your own path is the most important thing you can undertake, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Such a quest leads you to a place where dreams come true – Jerusalem, sure, but a mythical Jerusalem, a City on the Hill, one that you can reach in your mind even if you never make it to the actual city. The quest also leads to love, which for Whittemore is one of the most important things you can gain on your quest for self-realization. No one really gets a happy ending with the person they love in the books, but for Whittemore, the brief moments of intense love are as important as holding onto that love. Joe and Maud’s month in Aqaba, where Bernini is conceived, is more important than if they had stayed together. The memory of his affair with Anna is what makes Bell believe in the beauty of life. The love Joe and Stern have for each other is what makes their break in Smyrna that much more devastating, while the love Halim has for the pathetic Ziad is what drives Halim to his ultimate fate after Zaid is killed in Lebanon. Love might be fleeting, but it makes the characters what they are and gives them a goal to attain, and for Whittemore, that’s a grand thing. So it strikes me there are no commonplace people in the crowd, said Joe, and no innocents in the game of life really. We all seem to be double and triple agents with unknown sources and unsuspected lines of control, reporting a little here and a little there as we try to manage our secret networks of feeling and doing, our own little complex networks of life..." (Chp 18, 'Crypt/Mirror', 336-7) Lesley Hazleton’s books include the award-winning Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Where Mountains Roar. She lived thirteen years in Jerusalem, reporting on the Middle East for Time, The New York Times, Esquire, The Nation and many other publications. In a Whittemoreish move, she now lives and writes on a houseboat in Seattle. Prologue Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete, Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun. For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who made it at Yale in the 1950s, lost it in the CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in Dorset, Vermont. Whittemore explores many different themes, and his meandering plots and fascinating characters are what make the books such pleasures to read.”

THE GREAT JERUSALEM POKER Game for secret control of the city, the ruin of so many adventurers in the period between the two world wars, continued for twelve years before it finally spent itself. For international customers: The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 7AM and 14PM Israel time Toll IN THE FIRST LIGHT of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise. And that’s the truth, thought O’Sullivan Beare. Devious pranks sneaking out of the mists of central Europe and lurking on every side. Right you are and I could see that mischief coming.If you had to describe the novel in one line, you could say it’s about a twelve-year poker game for control of the holy city. But that, of course, is only the top layer, as you realize if you take just the three main players in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game: Moslem, Christian, and Jew. No it can’t, that’s true. But all things considered I’m still feeling glum today. Gloomy and glum and that’s a fact. Yes. The Japanese samurai used them in the Middle Ages. And that little creature asleep on your shoulder?

window, document, "script", "https://95662602.adoric-om.com/adoric.js", "Adoric_Script", "adoric","9cc40a7455aa779b8031bd738f77ccf1", "data-key"); You might have played a few games that seem to last forever but perhaps only last a few hours in the evening. The Bird Cage Theatre in Arizona claims that it is the home of the longest ever game of poker.The poker game started in 1881 and lasted an incredible 8 years, five months and three days. Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me. Could he come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver the long-awaited manuscript. There had been two false starts after Jericho Mosaic. Instead Ted told me he was dying. Would I be his literary executor? A year or so earlier Ted had been diagnosed as having prostate cancer. It was too far along for an operation. His doctor had prescribed hormones and other medication and the cancer had gone into remission. But now it had spread. Less than six months later he was dead. They were terrible months for him. However, during those last weeks and days while he slipped in and out of consciousness, he was looked after by Carol, who had never really left his life. A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims.Find sources: "Edward Whittemore"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( December 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Indeed you do, murmured the European thoughtfully. A case of excellent recall. Munk Szondi’s my name. From Budapest. We talked about the new novel. It was to be called Sister Sally and Billy the Kid and it was to be Ted’s first American novel. It was about an Italian in his twenties from the Chicago of the roaring Twenties. His older brother, a gangster, had helped him buy a flower shop. But there was a shoot-out, the older brother was dead, and Billy has to flee to the West Coast where he meets a faith healer not unlike Aimee Semple McPherson. The real-life McPherson disappeared for a month in 1926, and when she returned claimed she had been kidnapped. The stone house in which Billy and his faith healer spend their month of love (from the beginning it is clear that the idyll must be limited to one month) has a walled garden behind it full of lemon trees and singing birds. Although that house is in southern California, the garden bears a close resemblance to another garden in the Ethiopian compound in Jerusalem with a synagogue on one side and a Cistercian convent on the other. None of us had met him, except through his fiction, but we needed him. We needed him badly. Bogged down in the particularities of daily events, in the hourly newscasts and mind numbing series of military and political skirmishes, we needed someone who could soar above it all. Someone who could take the absurd reality in which we lived and weave it into a rich tapestry of realist absurdity. But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem.