Customer Reviews

Coming Home to Jerusalem: A Personal Journey

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A friend handed me this book and insisted, "This is the Summer Read that will stay in your head and heart." Looking at the cover, I assumed she had thought of me because, years ago, I worked in the Middle East. I am not Jewish, not Arab, and most importantly, I find politics of any kind to be boring. But Orange manages to make the politics irresistible through the lives of a host of individuals. She tells the story on so many levels, from specific moments already past to global consequences and conundrums which remain in effect. Even better than being the truth, the story is a page-turner. I loved the consciousness that runs throughout. This book delivers in so many categories: it is a woman's journey, a foreign affair, an education in the invisible life of Israel, a portrait of the Palestinians, a story filled with immediacy and charm. I was drawn into the picture and along for the ride. It is not merely a travelogue-- but it is definitely a TRIP. You're a member of the author's family within paragraphs but the writing never sinks to the tedious or home-grown. It is consistently literate, graceful, witty and to the point. Orange puts you on an intimate basis with her subjects immediately, sometimes with a single image or phrase. Highly recommended for anyone who loves to read. The statement that best captures my take on Coming Home To Jerusalem is, "This book gets under your skin and the pleasure is all yours!"

It has often been said that the best perspective for a writer is the stance of the outsider. Ms. Orange succeeds in that rarest of positions, the outsider who guilelessly admits to being a beginner and then in a few thrilling leaps plunges into the fray to become part of the intellignentsia. And there could be no place on earth more challenging than the Middle East. The reader will want to follow Ms. Orange on the journey because her intelligence and unswerving gaze, both outward and inward never falters. This book is rare in its willingness to combine the mundane - everyday parenting dilemmas, friendships, and love - with the big issues - politics in an embattled land. Both are handled with a prose that jumps off the page and carries the reader forward from first to last. An unforgettable book.

(I wrote this review 2 months ago, as the current flare up of conflict in Israel was beginning.) I was so sorry to see this book end. I kept stretching out finishing it because I knew I would miss it once it was over. Wendy Orange writes with so much honesty; she shares so much of herself that I feel I know her quite well. I'm experiencing Israel with her. Her personal style is what drew me into the story and into the politics of Israel. I have been vaguely acquainted with Israeli politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, but I never had a sense of place. This book gave me an entree into this world that I probably could not have gotten without visiting there. I have a vivid picture of the landscape, of the countyside, of Jerusalem and of various Palestinian villages. I also have a sense of the Palestinian culture, something most Americans are ignorant about. Now when I read about Israel in the mainstream and alternative press, I feel a clarity about the struggle there and have some idea about the geography. I'm so sad to read about the war between the Israeli army and the Palestinians. After reading Coming Home to Jerusalem I feel connected to these sad events. I hope the author will return to Jerusalem and write more about this important place. It is crucial that Americans learn about this story. I thank Wendy Orange for this great and timely book.

I work with authors every day and I have NEVER written a review before. This book quite simply is the best book I have ever read on the Middle East. In putting a human face on both sides of the conflict in this region, Orange has accomplished what few authors and journalists have managed to do up to this point. You get a sense from this book that everything you read everywhere else about Palestinians and Israelis is written on a lap top in a suite in the King David Hotel. The book takes you into homes and lives on both sides and makes the struggle there understandable in a way I've never seen before. More importantly, the book takes you along on an adventure and, like a good travel book, makes you want to go to Israel and see for yourself!!

I must admit for starters. I went into reading this with a bias. I grew up as a Jew in Brooklyn, New York. As much as I endeavor to treat folks as individuals, my gut reaction is to see Arabs as a faceless mass. After visiting Poland at this time last year and seeing the site of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, this only hardened my feeling toward ANY concessions toward Palestinians. I went in thinking that Dr. Orange was a deluded peacenik who would gamble the farm (Israel) away. Well, I was forced to start thinking of individuals while reading this book. Much as I tried, Dr. Orange made me see people, not slogans. Problem solving has to go to a "where do we go from here," not "You did this to me." As with any dispute, it can't be solved with schoolyard taunts of who did what and to which and to whom. Now, I feel differently about about anti-Arab acts I committed in college. Age and wisdom have their uses. Just read the book. The writing style is easy to follow. It is hard to put down. All should read it, not just Jews and Arabs. The book can be used as a basis for general problem solving. Read it at your own risk. For you wont be the same coming out as going in.

What can you say about a book that has so much promised impact that some people are afraid of it? This is what I said:

H-----, I can promise you that the book will provoke many feelings. You will cry, but you will also be filled with mana. Wendy Orange's evocation of the land, the sky, the way the light infuses its objects as if the light itself were animate, and the way she weaves the landscape into the warp and woof of people and politics is spellbinding.

I have actually had my bookmark on the last page for the last week -- I don't want to leave this place.

And I'm not Jewish or Palestinian! So it will probably be exponentially more intense for you. But though there is pain, frustration, futility and rage, there is so much soulfood in those pages.

Don't deny yourself!

Linda

Reading "Coming Home to Jerusalem" as the Middle East Summit was failing made the summit stakes clearer while the seemingly inevitable failure became more understandable. As the writer learns in the dialogue groups she attends between Israelis and Palestinians, peace is made individual by individual and until this process has won the convictions of large segments of the populations on both sides no summit diplomacy can succeed. Nonetheless her book leaves us feeling that a mutually tolerable peace is possible, although distant.Wendy Orange has written a compelling comedy/tragedy/romance of her six-year stay in Jerusalem between 1990 and 1997. Working as a journalist for a liberal Jewish-American magazine she has made the politics of the country vibrantly alive for her readers through fascinating renderings of the wildly diverse people she meets. In the unlikely position of an American Jew, the writer takes us to the dialogue groups she attends between Israelis and Palestinians and shows each of them to us in their particularity. As a result of this process and other encounters she does an extraordinary job of dispelling the demonization of the Palestinians so prevalent among many of us. She turns these "others" into fully resonant human beings, leading us on this trip of discovery through engaging and lucid writing. Indeed finding a home for herself and the "other" is her theme. Wendy Orange is a marvelous, entrancing writer. Her account and her life are enriched by her concerns for and nurture of her daughter and the discovery of romance with an Israeli. She takes you with her on this wonderful journey.

My mother found this book on Amazon.com. She insisted I read it. It took me a while to even open it up. But once I did, I couldn't stop reading. I read it over dinner. I read it after dinner. I read it long into the night. I just finished "Coming Home to Jerusalem" and here's my take: I will never get closer to the people of Israel or to the people of Palestine--short of going there for a decade!! than I did in this travel book. And, even then, what would I know that Wendy Orange hasn't showed me? What amazes me is that this American Jewish woman seems to have completely given herself, for years, to studying the "situation." That is a gift for me, making the indecipherable far more clear. This is what any good writer does: She or he enters a strange land and makes it her own, and in the process, makes it the readers' home as well. BRAVO to Orange and Thanks, Mom.

As an Israeli living in New York, I read this book and learned a lot about my own country, about realities that I knew but never focused on so clearly. Wendy Orange got under the skin of my homeland and inside the Palestinian territories too. I didn't think an American could teach me about Israel. Well, wrong I was!This is one great writer, very smart. As for the Palestinians, she, I'm sad to say, knows more about them then most Israelis do. This is a great learning experience from a really fair writer. Read this book.

Another Israeli signing on here. I live in Zichron Yaakov and am only visiting USA now. In Israel, in Palestine: the ground is burning, the bombs are flying, the people are getting afraid and everywhere hearts are cold. "Coming Home to Jerusalem" helped me get through the last weeks before I left home for a month. Sometimes these days in Israel, I wake up screaming because of the blindness and the misery taking over so many here. Wendy Orange is a good neshama. She knows the situation. She doesn't know the political solution--unfortunately no one does. But she knows how to keep, in hard hard times, a warm heart. You should read this and nothing else right now, to keep your heart warm in cold times.