Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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A deaf, seven-foot-seven duke, who is both master botanist and swordsman, explores the Middle East, writes an embarrassingly comprehensive treatise on sex, and then, offended by the revocation of his title, proceeds to sell his British estate and buy the Ottoman Empire. A bastard Albanian nobleman decides one day to become a monk and subsequently discovers a copy of The Bible, New Testament included, that is a thousand years older than Christ. An infamous Irish partisan, who happens to be the 33rd child of a prophet, flees British-occupied Ireland in the guise of a nun and becomes a Middle-Eastern arms smuggler.

It was during this time that Whittemore began working on the novels for which he is probably best known. These constitute the Jerusalem Quartet. His earlier book, Quin's Shanghai Circus (1974), contains the seeds of his series. [2] There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that the disparate parts of Ted’s world came together, perhaps for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with their own families (but not Ted’s former wives or the two daughters who had flown to New York to say goodbye); there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any spooks in attendance? One really can’t say, but there were eight spooks of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were, of course, there. Isildur1 had a reputation that precedes them. They would play any player and create a buzz, unlike any poker player before them. A profoundly nutty book full of mysteries, truths, untruths, idiot savants, necrophiliacs, magicians, dwarfs, circus masters, secret agents … A marvellous recasting of history in our century. — The New York Times Book Review The Jerusalem QuartetEdward Whittemore was such a writer! IMO, the Jerusalem Quartet (of which Sinai Tapestry is the first volume) is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Practically no-one has read it. Here's Jeff Vandermeer's recommendation. 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. During that time thousands of gamblers from around the world lost fortunes trying to win the Holy City, but in the end there were only three men at the table, the same three who had been there in the beginning. By 1981, Whittemore was living in a studio apartment on Third Avenue in New York City. And he was writing steadily. I had left Holt earlier that spring for another publishing house and a young colleague, Judy Karasik, took over the editorial work on Whittemore’s new novel, Nile Shadows. After Ted died, she wrote the epilogue to this novel. It is one of the most moving accounts of an editor’s working and personal relationship with an author I have ever read. She should have given it as a eulogy at Whittemore’s funeral twelve years after Nile Shadows appeared. The war is raging all around – soldiers fight and soldiers die… But at the same time all over the world the invisible fighters of the secret services continue to fight their invisible combats… And the rest of the people are frightened and waiting for the worst…

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 Finally, it's a perfectly decent psychological and sociological history of the Middle East in the 20th century. An attentive reader will come away with a good understanding of the region's sometimes-baffling politics. 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. Spy and be spied upon…” It sounds almost like a proverb. Concerning himself with the clandestine activities of mankind Edward Whittemore boldly combines tragedy, mythology and buffoonery… The novel spans centuries, and The Quartet adds the remaining decades. The characters are not just larger than life but above it and beyond it. It's not a typical fantasy. It takes place in our historical world and it doesn't ask for the willing suspension of disbelief. It forces it upon you. There's no magic in the accepted sense, unless the edges of reality can be called magic, and all of the events and characters are possible, if highly implausible. I've never laughed so hard while being educated in arcane history.

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I have. I’ve heard some fanciful reports on more than one occasion and some whimsical allegations too. But the truth is, he never existed. Couldn’t have, impossible on any account. No Englishman was ever that daft. A myth in the neighborhood pubs of the Holy Land, no more. Mad tales conjured up by the local Arabs when they’re high on their flying carpets, which is most of the time. Opium, it’s called. No offense meant to present company. A fascinating mélange of fact and fiction focusing on the Middle East in general and Jerusalem in particular. As jumbled as a Finnegans Wake. It never sold well perhaps because it’s not that good. But it has the bones of greatness. Imaginative. 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. Bloody Greeks and Persians and Jews and Arabs and Turks and Crusaders, there’s no end to it. And the odd bloated Mameluke floating down the Nile and the odd mad Mongolian whipping his horse into a frenzy, barbarians on their way in as usual to mix it up with assorted Assyrian charioteers and crazed Babylonians intent on the stars, while all the while the Chaldeans are sweeping in on the flanks and the Medes are sweeping out, and the Phoenicians are counting their money and the Egyptians are counting their gods, maybe the high priests of both of them getting together every millennium or so, to compare notes and see if either of them has come up with more of one than the other.

The air was warm and the desert still, the year was 1914 and the noble couple from Behind Pomerania had just fulfilled a lifelong dream of making love on the summit of the Great Pyramid at dawn, to the point of a final and exhaustive satisfaction. Sinai Tapestry is a seminal work of speculative fiction and one that everyone must read. I'm giving this book the highest possible recommendation. A major hole in the book for me is Stern himself. Whittemore handles the mystery, the ambiguity, the paranoia, the charismatic cult around this unknowable shadowy figure well, but when the actual dude finally does show up... He just doesn't seem all that interesting. He is just this guy, you know. (Have to furnish your own German psychoanalyst accent.) His appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions: which Joe frustratingly doesn't seem to want to ask. And it really does feel like a deflation. But no, after this section and the novel goes on, and Joe doesn't seem to have changed his view of Stern. That was a let down for me, though I guess it is equally possible that I missed the point on my rather fragmented first reading. (I'm sure there is a whole graduate thesis to be done on all the pillars of smoke in this novel, all leading to the columns of smoke coming from the Nazi death-camps.) The first book is probably my favorite, simply because Strongbow’s story is so much fun and it contains one of the most emotionally affecting pieces of writing I’ve ever read. After Strongbow leaves the book and Joe and Stern become the main characters, the action moves to 1920s Jerusalem, where Joe meets Haj Harun and Maud, the only woman who really has a major role in the books and with whom Joe has his child. Maud’s story is powerful, as she married Catherine Wallenstein, bore him a son, but escaped when his madness overcame him, then fell in love with a Greek man who was always away fighting, missing the birth and death of their child and finally dying of malaria during World War I. Maud’s fear of abandonment led to her leaving Joe with her son because she could never believe he wasn’t going to leave her first, and her betrayal led Joe to years of bitterness before they finally reconcile in Nile Shadows, 20 years after their break. Stern plots out a homeland in the Middle East for all faiths, a naïve dream that becomes more tenuous as the years go on, and Joe helps him bring guns into Palestine for the various factions he wants to help, because they all tell Stern that his dreams are great for the future but in the present they need guns. It all leads to a heartbreaking chapter at the end of the book, when Stern, Joe, and Haj Harun meet in Smyrna in September 1922 just as the Turks enter the city and begin massacring the Greeks and Armenians. Whittemore’s odd prose, which feels occasionally aloof and wry, turns dark and gut-wrenching, as the three men try to get themselves and Stern’s two friends – one of whom is the brother of the Greek man Maud fell in love with – out of the city. The story of Smyrna is tragic, and Whittemore writes about the various larger tragedies in the city as well as the very specific ones affecting the group. Joe breaks with Stern, hating his idealism in a world that can allow Smyrna to happen, and Stern eventually turns to morphine to ease the pain of his memories. The chapter is brilliant, and it provides a horrific climax to the book, one that leads directly to Stern’s death 20 years later in Cairo, an event that is the central focus of the third book, Nile Shadows. Excerpt from Jerusalem Poker The Jerusalem Post Group Breaking News World News IvritTalk- Free trial lesson The Jerusalem Report Jerusalem Post Lite Trending Articles חדשותמעריב לוחחגיםומועדים 2023 זמניכניסתשבת Real Estate Listings Hype Special Content Insights 50 Jews

Whittemore explores many different themes, and his meandering plots and fascinating characters are what make the books such pleasures to read.” More precisely, Whittemore didn’t soar so much as tunnel. He tunneled under the surface of Jerusalem, following the three-thousand-year-old antiquities dealer Haj Harun in his tattered yellow cape and dented Crusader helmet down through the physical layers of the place—one era’s stones laid on top of the previous one’s to create a vertical history—and into the existential city, the one we really inhabited if we could only escape daily reality long enough to see it. Find sources: "Edward Whittemore"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( December 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

He joined the Marines and served as an officer on a tour of duty in Japan. Approached by the relatively recently established CIA, he was recruited into the service, when it had many men from the Ivy League universities. Working undercover as a reporter for The Japan Times from 1958 until 1967, Whittemore traveled throughout the Far East, Europe and the Middle East. Poker has been around since 1829 and started in New Orleans by French settlers. The game involved bluffing your way to a win or bets originally called ‘Poques’, which was similar to today's draw poker. The author presents long digressions into the mundane minutia regarding the lives of minor characters only to tell us (after 30 minutes) that some tangential relation to the minor character is, in fact, a major player in the plot. Except, after falling asleep during the digression we no longer care about the tangential and irrelevant connections the author attempts to make to the overall story. 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.Whittemore’s colorful characters … wrestle fitfully with meaninglessness, time, and the grim realities of war… . As in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, characters return in name and shape through their progeny, while people, events, and certain phrases are regularly reintroduced, giving you the feeling that you are wandering through a labyrinth of memory." — The Voice Literary Supplement The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 07:00 AM and 14:00 PM and Fridays only handles distribution requests between 7:00 AM and 12:30 PM Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete, Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun. For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who made it at Yale in the 1950s, lost it in the CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in Dorset, Vermont. For international customers: The center is staffed and provides answers on Sundays through Thursdays between 7AM and 14PM Israel time Toll 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./divDIV