Edward
Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry
An Introduction
Sinai Tapestry,
originally published in 1977, is the first book of Edward
Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet: four novels that make
the long, complex history of the Middle East comprehensible
as no other books do, and that do so by creating an
alternate version of history - part real and part imagined
(and what pleasure, while reading, to speculate on what,
in the novels, is real and what imagined!) - that begins,
in this first book, by telling the story of how early
in the nineteenth century, Skanderbeg Wallenstein, a
fanatical Trappist monk from Albania, comes upon what
is "with out question the oldest Bible in the world"
and discovers that "It denied every religious truth
ever held by anyone"
What would happen,
then, he wonders - in ways not so different from the
actual speculations of twentieth century Biblical scholars
- "if the world suddenly suspected that Mohammed
might well have lived six centuries before Christ"
or that Christ had been a minor prophet in the age of
Elijah" or "that the virtues of Mary and Fatima
and Ruth had been confused in the minds of later chroniclers
and freely interchanged among them?"
"Melchizedek
must have his City of Peace," Wallenstein. concludes,
just as men must have their Jerusalem" Believing
that faith must be sustained in the world, Wallenstein
also believes that if the cause for faith is absent,
then it is his duty to provide it. "The decision
he had made in his cell," Whittemore tells us,
"was to forge the original Bible."
But this forgery
- what has led to it, and what issues from it-becomes,
in Sinai Tapestry, an imaginative conceit that informs
the entire Quartet: It is Whittemore's way of asking
us to consider the many ways in which illusions can
give birth to realities, by which realities can be transformed
by dreams, and - above all - through which the real
and the imagined can conspire to create those events
and legends that determine how we live, love, and die.
The four books
that make up the Jerusalem Quartet comprise, in their
entirety, nothing less than a remarkable love song to
the Holy Land, and to the myriad dreams and acts that
have, across more than four millennia, been at the heart
of all we have come to believe are cause and effect
of our individual and collective destinies.
But to speculate
about the relation in the Quartet between history and
belief, and between the real and the fanciful - to try
to understand or explain the complicated ways these
novels themselves, through story, speculate about the
nature, through time, of faith and belief, of the actual
and the fabricated, and of time itself - is to forget,
momentarily, that these are, first, last, and always,
novels that live because of Whittemore's unique gifts
as a storyteller.
"Place,"
Whittemore states, in Jericho Mosaic, the final volume
of the Quartet, "is the beginning of memory," and in these books Whittemore shows us, repeatedly,
how the history of a particular place - its past and
the dreams dreamt in it across millennia - are as much
the cause of things as are any mere political events.
The portraits of places such as Jericho,
Damascus, Beirut,
Jerusalem, and the Sinai - the texture and detail of
buildings and marketplaces, of underground chambers
and above-ground fortifications, of holy places and
deserts - are vividly, tangibly rendered. As with the "endless razings and rebuildings of Jerusalem,
"these places take on life and breathe life - in
the way Whittemore's characters do, and, in a fictional
world where the possible invariably takes precedence
over the probable, they become central actors in the
narrative.
"Jericho,"
reflects Abu Musa, a wealthy Arab patriarch and grower
of fruit trees who earlier in his life had ridden with
the forces of Lawrence of Arabia, "is a crossing
of history
.We sit but fifteen miles from Jerusalem
and a little more from Amman, and Jerusalem is midway
between Amman, the Ancient Creek city of Philadelphia,
and the sea. Jerusalem is holy, and biblical Rabbat
Ammon or Amman is where King David put Uriah the Hittite
in the forefront of battle to be killed, so he might
enjoy the dead man's wife Bathsheba, who gave the king
a son called Solomon. Thus the mountains and the valley,
the deserts and the sea, lust and wisdom and murder
and empire, these various profane and sacred causes
of man all find their crossroads in Jericho, which is
why we grow oranges here. To refresh those who are forever
passing through."
Jericho Mosaic,
from which this passage comes, is the most coherent,
and the most coherently realized of the four novels.
It is an intricate tale of espionage that centers on
the story of Yossi, a young Israeli, allegedly killed
during the 1956 war in the Sinai, who becomes an agent
whose mission it is "to penetrate Arab culture
so deeply that he would never come back." The story
(modeled in large part on the true story of the Israeli
agent Ellie Cohen) of how he forges a new identity for
himself, survives various Syrian regimes, passes information
along and learns to become the respected businessman
Halim - especially the way in which his intelligence-gathering
is decisive in the Six Day War of 1967 - is complex
and compelling - worthy of comparison to the novels
of John Le Carre or - a more apt comparison - to those
of Graham Greene.
But before we come
to this final novel of the Quartet, and to a depiction
of events that have taken place in the Middle East within
living memory, Whittemore takes us back, through time,
to the very beginnings of recorded history, and he does
so, especially in this first novel, Sinai Tapestry,
in ways that will remind readers more of Borges and
Marquez than of Le Carre or Greene; and in ways that
remain uniquely Whittemore.
In Sinai Tapestry,
characters move from place to place; and through time
itself - and history - in improbable and implausible
ways; they are conceived, and rendered for us, as larger
than life, often literally so. Consider two of Whittemore's
creations, Plantagent Strongbow and Haj Harun.
Plantagenet Strongbow,
whom we meet. on page one, is twenty-ninth Duke of Dorset,
a great swordsman, botanist, and explorer; he disappears
in the Sinai in 1840, and reappears forty years later
as an Arab holy man who has written a thirty-three volume
study of Levantine sex, and who becomes the secret owner
of the Ottoman Empire; and he is seven-feet seven-inches
tall. And Haj Harun, a former antiquities dealer and
stone carver of winged lions during the Assyrian occupation
of the Holy Land, a proprietor of an all-night grocery
store under the Greeks, a waiter under the Romans, a
distributor of hashish and goats under the Turks, is
a man who has been able to do all these things and to
live in all these places because he is at least three
thousand years old.
"When I want
to daydream," he says to Strongbow, "I gaze
at one of my antiquities and pretty soon I'm slipping
back in time and seeing Romans and Babylonians in the
streets of Jerusalem."
What is remarkable
about Sinai Tapestry is that its flights of invention,
as in these instances, are set forth in ways that are
as playful and ordinary as they are mysterious and magical.
It is as if the multitude of stories - many reflecting
actual events of history, others seeming to be tall
tales - are, effectively, trying to persuade us of what,
in the Middle East, often seems true: that the entire
history of the region, and of those who have peopled
it - Christians, Jews, and Muslims - can be present
in any one moment, and in any one place, and - as in
Haj Harun's shop - in any one object. What Whittemore
does to create this sense of timelessness is to keep
his eye constantly on the relation between the large
movements of history and their most ordinary, palpable
human sources. He never loses sight, that is, of the
ways the most sublime or savage moments, in war and
in peace, arise from and impinge upon individual human
beings: their sufferings, hopes, desires, joys, confusions,
and losses.
Thus, the following
descriptions, a few pages apart, of moments that occur
shortly before, and that look forward to, World War
Two:
"Haj Harun's
crumpled figure was all but lifeless. He lay on the
stony ground gasping painfully for breath, his face
smeared with blood. Blood and rust filled his eyes.
The circle of blood below his waist was spreading. The
broken leg was bent awkwardly to one side."
"An ugly world
and she was frightened. People left you, why? what had
you done? Everyone always went away and there was no
one to trust, so she dreamed. At home alone she took
off her clothes and danced in front of a mirror, dreaming,
because dreams alone were safe and beautiful."
And this, of the
massacre in Smyrna, in the year 1922:
"Turks worked
the peripheries robbing and killing and taking girls.
Horses' halters catching fire, the beasts charging through
the crowds trampling bodies. The crowds so dense in
places the dead remained standing, held up by tile living."
If, at first, coming
upon such passages, we find ourselves making comparisons,
as critics have done, to the fiction of Barth, Borges,
Marquez, Nabokov, or Pynchon, the more accurate comparison
would seem to be to that very book that is central to
Sinai Tapestry. For in its use of folk tales, its erratic
mixture of fact and legend, its truncating of time,
its insistence on the validity of miracles, its chronicling
of conquests and wars, its listings of lineages, its
depictions of barbarism and heroism, and - above all
- its tracing, through individual lives and family sagas,
of the small and large moments and movements of history,
Sinai Tapestry is the most Biblical of books.
In its setting,
in its style and its subject, in its swift movements
through time, and in its vision of all that is depraved
and redemptive about humankind, Sinai Tapestry thus
recalls the very book whose reality it calls into question.
Early in the novel, Strongbow, who has made his way,
by foot, from Constantinople to the Holy Land, asks
others the question he had been asking himself. "Have
you heard of a mysterious lost book in which all things
are written? A book that is circular and unchronicled
and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity?"
And later in the
book, Strongbow's son Stern, thinking of his father
and his grandfather - Englishman, Arab, Jew - has this
epiphany, not unlike those of the patriarchs of the
Old Testament:
"The vision
burst upon him. A homeland for all the peoples of his
heritage. One nation embracing Arabs and Christians
and Jews. A new world and the Fertile Crescent of antiquity
reborn in the new century one great nation stretching
majestically from the Nile through Arabia and Palestine
and Syria to the foothills of Anatolia, watered by the
Jordan and the Tigris and the Euphrates as well, by
Galilee, a vast nation honoring all of its three and
twelve and forty thousand prophets, a splendid nation
where the legendary cities would be raised to flourish
once more, Memphis of Menes and Ecbatana of Media and
Sidon and Alep of the Hittites, Kish and Lagash of Sumer
and Zoar of the Edomites, Akkad of Sargon and Tyre of
the purple dye and Acre of the Crusaders, Petra of the
Nabataeans and Ctesiphon of the Sassanids and Basra
of the Abbasids, sublime Jerusalem and the equally sublime
Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights."
In the early winter
of the year 2000, at the age of 61, I visited Israel
for the first time in my life. On my last evening there,
in Jerusalem, a short while after the Sabbath had ended,
my cousin Jerrold who had settled in Israel 37 years
before (both of us are blessed with the Hebrew name
of Yakov, in memory of our paternal grandfather), arrived
at my hotel to bid me farewell. Embracing me, he asked
that I not wait until another 61 years had passed before
I visited Jerusalem again.
But I recall thinking,
at the time, that were I living in the Jerusalem of
Edward Whittemore, I could return as easily in 61 years
as I could in 61 days. (Near the end of the novel, musing
on his father's life, Stern thinks: "What he did
is too unreal not to be true. No one could forge a life
like his." And whenever and however I might return
- in fact, or in fancy, or in memory - I would find
that my sense of the city would be enhanced by having
read the four books that comprise Whittemore's Jerusalem
Quartet.
The Quartet is,
in sum, larger than any of its individual parts - an
imaginative construct that allows us to wander through
time, place, and history with a knowledgeable and crafty
guide, and thereby to allow memory and imagination to
inspire us, the novels suggest, as they have inspired
others before us, and have, thereby, brought into being
everything that would seem to radiate from the very
stones of this holiest of cities - this place where
heaven and earth are said to meet - not least of which
is the power of imagination and desire, when allied
with memory, to shape history itself.
©Jay Neugeboren
New York City, 2002
Jay Neugeboren
is the author of 13 books, including the prizewinning
novels, The Stolen Jew and Before My Life Began, and
two award-winning books of non-fiction, Imagining Robert
and Transforming Madness. He is lives in New York City
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