Customer Reviews

Revenge: A Story of Hope

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Laura Blumenfeld book REVENGE is really three stories. It is the story of her family and its interactions, It is the story of her desire for Revenge, and it is the story of her searching from culture to culture, from the land of my ancestors (Sicily), to Albania, to Iran for justification for the revenge she craves for the attempted murder of her father.

The encounters with the various cultures was great reading, The Iranian cleric who saw a difference between a Jew born in the Holy Land, a tourist and a European who moved there in terms of their right for revenge was incredible.

Her encounters with the family of the shooter and those who ordered it was riviting, particularly since they not knowing who she really was, were willing to lie to her face concerning the shooting, perhaps they were lied to as well, who knows? It was drama and a page turner.

Her own family situation frankly couldn't compare. I understand that to each person their own situation is what drives them, but I found myself rushing through that stuff to get to the other, however I don't think I could see the book working without them. The dispute over the Greek Temple, to me was the defining moment of those encounters.

It is a very relevent book and one of the most worthwhile reads I've had. It combines history, current events and cultural values in a way that no history book or cultural text could. Its weaknesses are unable to push it down to three stars for me. Read it.

Laura Blumenfeld writes beautifully. But people looking for an objective or scholarly treatise on revenge, or a monograph on the situation in the Middle East, should go elsewhere. This book is a personal journey of discovery and adventure, filled with emotional truths and some shocking surprises. In the end, the author exposes herself in a way few writers would dare. I loved this book. But even if you don't, you have to admire it.

This book transcends the partisan politics of the Middle East conflicts to present a deeply moving look at one person's experiences of the same. Not for tiny minds hungry for nothing but entertainment, but a useful read for anyone interested in remaining human in this increasingly complicated and violent world.

There are times in reading Laura Blumenfeld's revenge that I inwardly cringe, wishing there was a bit more introspection to her crusade. What made this book so compelling is the message that we all have the ability to choose our own revenge for past hurts. Laura is very honest about her wish to somehow find a revenge for the shooting of her father. What drives the story is the intertwining of the lives of her and her family, and her quest to find out all she could about the man who shot her father. This quest compells her to live in Isreal and to seek out and get to know the family of the shooter. It also forces her to confront some of the feelings she has as a Jew towards the turmoil in Isreal and the continuing violence. As she comes closer to confronting the shooter, she finds that all is not cut and dried, and that there are other currents beneath her quest for revenge. The clarity and honesty that this story is told with is breathtaking, for it confronts the dilemna of revenge, and the seemingly never-ending cycle it nutures. I could not put this book down, partly because it had no pat ending, no made for TV ending. It was honest and does not pretend to know the solutions for the continuing cycle of violence. It is simply a story of how one young woman came to confront and understand the drive which seems to take over her life, and how she does not let that quest destroy her.

"A story of hope" indeed, beautifully written and conceived. This is an extraordinary book. I couldn't put it down. It combines an in depth analysis of the human drive for revenge with a very personal quest. Frankly, while I found the study of revenge customs, in general, to be interesting, the personal story blew me away with its intensity and message. One hopes that this author's approach could be applied to the current situation. She succeeded in teaching one terrorist, at least, that his victim was a human being, rather than an impersonal military objective.

This is a wonderful book. The writer, a Jewish American journalist, goes on a personal mission not of revenge, in my opinion, but of reconcilation between Palestinian and Jew.
In an historical moment where Jewish and Arab tribalism are triumphant, Blumenfeld achieves the wisdom that is understanding that there is no way to peace. Peace is the way. (AJ Muste). Sharon and Arafat would not like this book. It is for those of us desperate to escape the insanity that will, if left unchecked, destroy Israel and Palestine both.

Laura Blumenfeld, a young reporter for the Washington Post, has written a sometimes engaging book about revenge and its motives that finds its inspiration in her personal history. She explores the reason for vengeance in humans through the study of different cultures but most importantly, by far, is the pulse of revenge her own body and soul feels, sparked by the shooting of her father in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman.
Blumenfeld's father, an American rabbi was a victim of a random attack. He happened to be walking in Jerusalem in 1986 at dusk when a gunman, Omar Khatib shot him on the scalp, leaving a gouge on his head. A centimeter lower and the bullet would have penetrated his skull, most probably killing him instantly. As it was, her father was relatively unhurt and able to continue a normal life. Omar was a member of a group of terrorists who vowed to avenge the U.S. bombing of Libya by randomly killing tourists in Jerusalem.
Enter his daughter, 12 years later, newly married and off to Jerusalem with her husband to live in the Old City for their first year of marriage. Ostensibly, she took a year from her reporter's job for a book writing sabbatical, a book whose topic is revenge and how different people cope with crimes and slights exercised on their person and their family. More relevantly, she goes to Israel to track down her father's gunman and exact some measure of revenge, though what that may materially be is very unsettled in her mind.
Her journey finds her meeting Omar's family in Ramallah, the nexus of Palestinian authority in the West Bank. Her descriptions of their many meetings are clouded by her intimate connection with the crime in question. Since the shooter is still in jail, she can only correspond with him through smuggled letters exchanged by the family via their regular visits with Omar. Critically, she has decided to mask her real identity to the family, calling herself simply Laura or Laura Weiss (her married name) and not giving any indication that she is the daughter of the victim. This leads to a dramatic ending to the book, one that would put many novels to shame, when she reveals herself to the family and Omar in a memorable court scene.
While Blumenfeld's writing is uneven and her search for the appropriate remedy for her vengeful impulses become rather drawn and laborious to the point of being pedantic, she nevertheless has a extremely engaging story to tell. Some of her best writing emanates from her research into how different cultures treat vengeance. She traveled to bastions of vengeance such as Sicily, Albania (where vengeance has even be codified in a published manual outside the purview of the legal system, but much more relevant than their law), Iran and Egypt to interview people on how their injustices are remedied. What emerges from her original research is a world where America's simple and trusting view of crime and punishment has very little foothold and a world where mysticism, belief, faith and superstition still dominate, if not monopolize many facets of life.
Still, this is book is predominately Blumenfeld's own story and its climax is powerful. However, one must remember that even if she can effect change in one Palestinian family, her story is the rare exception in the Middle East. Noble as her effort is, she is a educated American with the means and ability to study her own primeval urge towards vengeance with some measure of balance and make what one many would see as an enlightened choice. Her story is rare indeed and as such, is unsuitable as a blueprint for a healing between the parties. If only everyone could be as intellectually faithful as the author, the world would be a much finer place. Alas, we shall never witness such a world.

This is one of the best books I have ever read about the personal impact of violence on an individual. However, instead of my comments, I would like to forward a quote from an article that appeared in Newsday on April 2, 2003. The article is about a good man named Arie Bucheister who was gunned down, senselessly, while at work in his store. His wife, Beth, talks about the lessons learned and the comfort she has gotten from Laura Blumenfeld's book, "Revenge."

"If anything was on Arie's mind, Beth said, she was unaware. He had not seemed troubled when he left New York. There was no sense that he was afraid or anxious.

But he had been reading a book that may have put him in a pensive mood.

"Revenge: A Story of Hope," by journalist Laura Blumenfeld, is an account of the author's search for the Arab man - a militant member of the Palestine Liberation Organization - who shot and wounded her father, David, a rabbi, during a trip to Israel. Though Blumenfeld, who grew up on Long Island, was at first consumed by anger, "Revenge" shows how the writer's fury was transformed.

Beth said the story resonated with Arie.

"Now that I've read that book, I know I have lived my life the right way," Arie told Beth.

Blumenfeld's exerience confirmed Arie's notions of basic decency, Beth said, and emphasized his conviction that "teaching each other right from wrong does make a difference."

By the time he completed "Revenge," Arie was in tears, Beth said.

He died a few days later - shot in his office, door open, believing the best."

Copyright (c) 2003, Newsday, Inc.

Clearly, this book will have a major impact on every reader.

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How does one begin to describe a book that is at once a courageous odyssey of the mind and heart, an educational primer on the taking of revenge, a cornucopia of vivid personalities, an examination of the morality behind the world's responses to outrage, a journalistic investigation of a crime, a peek into familial dynamics, and a penetrating in-depth look into the soul of its author--warts, neuroses, and conflicted yearnings all on prominent display. "Revenge: a story of hope" by Laura Blumenfeld (a reporter for the Washington Post), is all of these things, as well as being a riveting, emotional, occasionally hilarious page turner. The story is set in motion in 1986 when the author's father is shot by a terrorist as he walked the streets of Jerusalem. Though not seriously injured, this act wounded his daughter's sensibilities deeply. A college student at the time, she wrote a poem about the incident, addressed to the terrorist that ended with a promise for revenge:

". . . this hand will find you--I am his daughter."

This unsettling idea remained in the back of her mind, needling her, until 12 years later she and her new husband moved to Israel for a year, setting in motion her inchoate plan to exact retribution. Plan? More like an ill-focused need or desire in search of a goal. She proceeded to read what she could get her hands on about the subject of vengeance, while taking trips all over Europe and the Middle East talking to individuals who had lost loved ones to acts of vengeance, to individuals who had taken revenge, to purported experts on the subject, to religious and philosophical leaders, to heads of State, to strangers on the street, to friends, to family, and finally to the shooters family. Along the way she meets a would-be avenger for the Holocaust who planned to poison tens of thousand of random Germans in an act of collective revenge--who nonetheless thought the idea of personal vengeance to be criminal. She interviews Anez abu Salim, a Bedouin Tribesman, who achieved revenge by composing a poem recounting how his wife had betrayed him. She slips into the holy city of Qom, Iran while in disguise (not at a little risk to herself, being Jewish, foreign, and a woman) to ask a Grand Ayatollah whether, according to precepts of Islam, she was entitled to revenge. All of this is fascinating reading, giving the reader a clear sense of how far man has yet to travel before finding a balance between the competing needs of retribution, compassion, and order--a distance so great that the book might have left a despairing taste--if not what lies at the heart of this volume. It is the author's personal journey that ultimately buoys this work, propelled by an earnest openness and accessible prose, as we follow her through some surprisingly neurotic detours while her thoughts slowly coalesce into an idiosyncratic plan of action--a form of "revenge" that is almost as surprising as it proves cathartic and profoundly moving. I can hardly conceive of an individual (outside of the odd terrorist) who will not find this odyssey through the desert of despair to an oasis of reconciliation and hope utterly compelling.

We say we are too civilized to want revenge, and instead call it "justice", but until we analyze all aspects of this primitive and destructive tendancy, we are only fooling ourselves. Laura Blumenfeld does exactly that. In a writing style that suggests a conversation with the reader over a cup of tea, the author traces her thinking processes regarding her perceived need for revenge against the backdrop of culture and family. Openly recognizing the contradictions within herself and her value system, she is able to become a thinking, evolving and compassionate human being.

In response to a violent act against her father, she sets out to examine ways in which she might get revenge against his attacker and others who were involved indirectly. (Interestingly, her father has no interest in revenge himself and serves as one of many consultants for her.) Along the way, however, she must confront her own mistaken perceptions, her lack of understanding of the values of others, and the reality that good and evil are often in the eyes of the beholders.

Questions about the ethics of her concealment of her identity are raised and one must ask if the ends in this case do justify the means. Some parts of her writing do make her seem incredibly naive, but I found that this allowed me, as a reader, to appreciate the full value of what she was thinking and doing. While she concealed much of who she was to the individuals she was interviewing in the book, she does not conceal anything about herself from the reader. We can identify with her and hopefully see that her message is useful in all our lives. "Revenge is useless" and "forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves." (often repeated quotes...original source unknown to me.)

I was not expecting the photographs I encountered midway through the book and finding them at that point was a powerful experience. Please, if you read this book, don't look at them until you reach the middle of the book. They were the icing on the bittersweet cake.

The choice of forgiveness over revenge is one we are hearing about more and more if we are paying attention, however this book goes into details that are left out of the accounts we read about in the news or hear about on television talk shows. It is time to change our thoughts about revenge and make it a thing of the past. Every situation offers us the choice of acting out of love or out of fear. This book shows how one person arrived at the right choice in extraordinary circumstances.