Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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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. a meeting in 1933 precedes a conversation in the 1920s but illuminates some of the more opaque things that were said in 1933”

It was during these early fall visits that I discovered that his Prentiss great-grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister who had made his way up the Hudson River by boat from New York to Troy and then over to Vermont by train and wagon in the 1860s. In the library of the white, rambling Victorian house in Dorset there were shelves of fading leather-bound volumes of popular romances written by his great-grandmother for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves, dress, and find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the Danielle Steele of her day, and the family’s modest wealth was due to her literary efforts and not the generosity of the church’s congregation. An epic hashish dream … cosmic … fabulous … droll and moving. — The New York Times Book Review on Sinai Tapestry 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.

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In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.” In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Publishers Weekly called him our best unknown novelist. Jim Hougan, writing in Harper’s Magazine, said Whittemore was one of the last, best arguments against television…. He is an author of extraordinary talents…. The milieu is one in which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally transformed by the writer’s wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of time and history. Isildur1 had a reputation that precedes them. They would play any player and create a buzz, unlike any poker player before them. But Jerusalem and Haj Harun are just two of the beguiling characters conjured by Whittemore's inventive and original mind. Szondi, Martyr and O'Sullivan Beare, and a host of minor players, some weird, some mad, all memorable, career through history, adventure, misadventure, tragedy, love and time to end up somehow entangled in the affairs of the ancient city.

For international customers: The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 7AM and 14PM Israel time TollA lonely hero still only twenty-one years old, wearing as an unlikely disguise that day the uniform of an officer of light cavalry in Her Majesty’s expeditionary force to the Crimea, 1854, the medals on his chest showing he had survived a famous suicidal charge and been awarded the Victoria Cross because of it, far from home now huddled over a glass of Arab cognac that helped not at all, finding life bleak and meaningless on that cold December afternoon, simply that.

window, document, "script", "https://95662602.adoric-om.com/adoric.js", "Adoric_Script", "adoric","9cc40a7455aa779b8031bd738f77ccf1", "data-key");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.

Tools and services JPost Premium Ulpan Online JPost Newsletter Our Magazines Learn Hebrew RSS feed JPost.com Archive Digital Library Lists of Jewish holidays Law Many writers and critics have lauded the novels' breadth and imaginative intensity in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The Village Voice, Locus Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.The final book in what is one of the most wonderful achievements in 20th-century literature… . Without illusion, but with supreme intelligence and a generous heart, Whittemore shows us just how painful, beautiful, and surprising … life’s reversals can be, and how our struggles with ourselves and others can ultimately seem to change time itself. — The Philadelphia Inquirer on Jericho Mosaic