Customer Reviews

Martyrs' Crossing: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

What novel could be more timely and inviting than an intelligent, literate, readable, suspenseful, emotionally compelling, and thoughtful story treating the question: What--among the varied human experiences of family, friendship, history, culture, religion, tradition, heritage, territory, nationhood, ideals, values, competing loyalties, and the notion of truth itself--is worth living for, working for--and especially--killing and/or dying for?

To be sure, Wilentz never comes right out and asks these questions--instead, her beautifully plotted story subtly raises, explores, and offers insight into all of them, by offering a wide range of intelligent characters from varying ages, backgrounds, and experiences, who are arriving at a multiplexity of conclusions and viewpoints while facing intricately intertwined human dilemmas.

I know this book will provoke animated and thoughtful discussion in my book club.

I was first attracted to the book (when browsing in the "New Book Section" of our library) by Wilentz's beautiful writing style, as well as her very evident intellectual depth. She has clearly spent much time living in and reporting on Israel/The West Bank, but more importantly, she has thought long and respectfully about disparate approaches to politics, patriotism, and violence.

This is not a heavy, depressing book, it's a love story--in fact a compilation of moving and convincing love stories about the varieties of passionate human relationships. It's gripping--at times seeming to move inexorably toward a Greekly tragic conclusion (although I found the end surprisingly heartening.) I felt I understood each character's struggle to find integrity and meaning; Wilentz works hard to give each viewpoint a human face and a convincing history and testimony.

Wilentz has a talent for character and for realistic thoughts/dialogue. She makes all her characters appealing and believable (sometimes grotesquely so), all worthy of respect and understanding, in their individual struggles to make sense of the most difficult human challenges.

Although I'm fascinated with the political and spiritual questions Wilentz raises, and although I've read urgently in the areas of war, peace, politics, religion and philosophy, I have never been to Israel and know no Palestinians. I felt that Wilentz's pen was painfully sharp, cynical, and for the most part balanced, when aimed at the hypocrisies of both "sides," and also strongly empathetic and sympathetic, when focused on the pain and grievances of both sides.

But ultimately, this is not a book about Jews and Palestinians. It's a book about home, and integrity, and about the personal qualities, values, and actions that make a person deserve to call a building and a child and a spouse and a friend and a city and a land, "his/her own."

And although Wilentz never directly mentions the word "nationalism," I believe this is also a book about whether the concept of nationalism is ultimately helpful or hurtful to human life.

I couldn't put this book down. I loved the story, the style, the characters, the author, and learned a great deal about important issues I care deeply about. This is great writing from a great writer. I hope someday to read many more of her books....

Better reporters than Amy Wilentz have found themselves caught short by the transition from journalism to fiction (for example Jimmy Breslin, whose novels always leave me hungry for his column). But im Martyr's Crossing Amy Wilentz has vaulted across in her very first attempt. The story takes an incident that could be from today's headlines (and, tragically, tomorrow's headlines as well): the death of a child in Israel. In this case, the child is killed by asthma and the lack of proper medical treatment, not by a bullet. Also in this case the child is Palestinian. But part of the triumph of this book is the way Wilentz's characters--Israelis and Palestinians--are three dimensional human beings, not cardboard caricatures of good and evil.

There are terrorists here, and terror, and the cold political calculations of men determined to hold on to power, willing to exploit any tragedy if it serves their purposes. But Wilentz's humane and gripping narrative is a million miles from the wooden gestures of the politcal thriller. The center of her attention, and ours, is the boy's mother, Marina, American born and educated, but drawn back to the Palestine described by her father, a Harvard professor. Wilentz's description of the tensions and passions between father and daughter is superb, as is her portrayal of the almost unendurable sorrow of a mother powerless to keep her child alive. But what makes the novel even more exceptional is Wilentz's equally compelling portrayal of the Israeli who first keeps Marina from passing his checkpoint (and getting her son to the hospital) then valiantly, but vainly, attempts to help.

Wilentz offers no easy answers. Instead, she allows both sides the full weight of their tragic collision. Beautifully written, and clearly informed by careful reporting, this is a triumphant fictional debut.

Martyr's Crossing is a beautifully written and moving story with vivid characters. It has a modern hero in the conflicted young Israeli lieutenant who tries to help a Palestinian woman at a border checkpoint. It has a beautiful young mother whose bravery is heartbreaking. The book has brains and heart and elements of the thriller. It is literary. "He felt dizzy with the past, as if it were suddenly physical," Wilentz writes of a Palestinian man, visiting his Jerusalem home after 50 years away. Reading this book, the past does seem physical, and so does the wrenching present. This book brims with tastes and smells, sounds and texture, so that the place and its people come alive. One thing that strikes me as extraordinary about the book is how political it is without being partisan or overbearing. A good read.

On the jacket a comment is made that the Author takes what are normally, "journalistic subjects, and shows their internal life". This is a goal difficult to achieve however noble, with a subject that has been presented so vividly and visually for decades. I enjoyed the book but I did not feel this particular point was reached, and again that may have been due to the storyline unfolding a tale that while terrible is nauseatingly familiar. The incident in this book is tragic and graphic, and as pathetic as it may be the images are as familiar in Oklahoma as they are in this Checkpoint locale. I am not suggesting they are a daily occurrence here as they are elsewhere, just that people's attitudes toward those they view as different are the norm not the exception. Those same people are willing to harm other groups with the same ease with which they hate.

The violence that consumes those people and the lands they dispute are in a continuous loop of violence like other perpetual fights elsewhere in the world. The more disturbing part of this story is the degree to which the violence is manipulated, the citizens on either side used and their feelings motivated/created through propaganda and truths that are omitted. The Author also took a gutsy and praiseworthy stance of the hypocrisy of religion, the tool it has become, and in some cases how irrelevant it has made itself. In one part of the book she focuses on religious proclamations by the highest of their religion and shows them for what they are, totally meaningless and bereft of any value. As a counterpoint to the story she is relating I thought that worked very well.

Ms. Amy Wilnetz has taken both sides to task in, "Martyrs' Crossing". And while it would be foolish to expect this book will change what we see on CNN routinely, optimists can hope that each time the story is told, the effort made, some progress will be gained as well.

I loved Martyrs' Crossing; couldn't put it down. The characters leapt off the page, absorbing me completely. Wilentz's style is simultaneously raw and refined. Very refreshing indeed. Martyrs' Crossing is a work of shocking candor and devastating immediacy and I can only hope to enjoy more fiction from this fine writer in the near future.

One of the most moving moments in this book is when the Palestinian professor, George, visits the house that he was forced to abandon in 1948. The experience of the Jewish woman who inhabits George's house adds a terrible irony to the story.

The characters in the book put a human face on the conflict. This is refreshing at a time when we are bombarded with news stories and sound bites and tend to let them form our opinions.

I spent three years in Jerusalem, walking the neighborhoods and crossing the checkpoints Ms. Wilentz describes, and this book just *gets* it. The author transports you, movingly, into the lives and minds of Israelis and Palestinians, with a fidelity to what is human in all of them. I have not seen anything like it for crossing the imaginative barrier between the tribes. As an outsider, I came to accept that my Israeli and Palestinian friends had no idea what it was like to cross that divide. They need this book as much as we do.

Martyr's Crossing is a well-crafted political novel about our common humanity and what political violence does to individuals. The book's characters are not predictable stereotypes, but rather flesh and blood.

Wilentz's political insights are right on. Here's the Palestinian-American grandfather of the toddler who dies at the beginning of the novel, musing on how events can be manipulated: "You find something, something good, something that really sparks the people because it comes from deep down, and you pump it. Something like the torture of a prisoner, the assassination of a poet - the murder of a child. He remembered Ahmed's lecture on manipulating the fortuitous in history: History can change a man's standing overnight. A speech, a coup, an unforseen incident. Pump it till it's dry."

Here's another, again from the grandfather: "The problem of Palestine was that everyone wanted things simple: everyone was an extremist because everyone wanted things simple. It was the problem of humanity. Good and evil, as if there were only those two."

The story takes in many moving scenes, such as when the young Israeli soldier puts on his uniform and visits the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, and feels the scorn of the guests and staff; when the Palestinian-American grandfather finally visits the house his family fled in 1948, his parents coming alive to him as he touches the furniture they left behind, and talks with the Jewish family living there now; the young mother ironing her dead toddler's clothes, getting the wrinkles out, making them flat, thinking of a lifetime of sheets ahead of her; and a comforting, beautiful description of what of the characters experiences while dying.

I have a small quibble with one too pat plot point, and wonder too if the characters are too self-examining, too nuanced - nearly all of them understanding so many nuances of the conflict, giving perhaps not enough differentiation between them. Neither of these questions got in the way of my enjoying these characters, the plot, Wilentz's keen insights or her graceful writing style.

At first the title and cover intrigued me, but soon I was drawn into the plot, which will continue to connect to current events for years to come. The story takes place in West Bank and is told from two sides. The book revolves around the death of a Palestinian two-year-old, Ibrahim, whose mother was delayed by Israeli guards, as she tried to take her son across the border to an Israeli hospital. Some parts are told from the point of view of Maria, the Palestinian woman, who is the daughter of a famous Palestinian intellectual living in America, and also the wife of Hassan Hajimi, an imprisoned Hamas member. Other parts are told from the eyes of Ari Dolton, the soldier who was ordered to keep Maria from crossing the border. Controversy ensues over the death; some Palestinians proclaim Ibrahim a martyr and this a new cause to fight against Israel. The Israeli papers portray Ibrahim as simply a future terrorist. But for Maria, her father, and Hassan, this is not a news event, not a new cause, but simply the tragic death of a child. Wilentz manages to show both sides fairly; there is no good and evil. Instead, she paints a picture of a conflict that affects life, survival, and skips over no one. The book, using engaging dialogue, language, and a variety of fascinating characters, is hard to put down. I would recommend anyone interested in history or current events read it to get a more personal, yet not one-sided, view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I read this book several years ago, and continue to recommend it to my friends and book clubs. As I read the various reviews, many who were dissappointed with this book seem to be emotionally charged about the situation in the middle east. Unfortunately, there are many in the populous who are not quite as educated, nor as emotionally charged by this particular situation. This book does a wonderful job of reaching out to those who want to begin to understand the human aspect involved in this, and many other conflicts. As a mother, and one who has lived in Africa amidst severe and tragic conflict, I found this book to be both timely and engaging. Wilentz does a good job of character development without political judgement. Not an easy thing to do when conveying such charged subject.