Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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Don’t know, do I. Just guessing though, I’d say it has something to do with having been through too much for my age. Excessive experience, I mean. It’s worn me down until now I’m worn out. Here I am only twenty-one years old and I’m already a veteran of a war that was fought nearly seventy years ago. And that’s a weight for a man to carry. Do you follow me? Sinai Tapestry is a seminal work of speculative fiction and one that everyone must read. I'm giving this book the highest possible recommendation. Card games have been an excellent way for people to spend time for hundreds of thousands of years.Playing cards were invented in China before AD1000, and they made their way to the EU in 1360. One of the oldest card game references is a game called the 'leaf game'. 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. In the early nineteenth century, Skanderberg Wallenstein, a fanatical Albanian monk and linguist, unearths in a monastery in Jerusalem the oldest Bible in the world and discovers that it denies every religious truth ever held by anyone. Fearful of the consequences of its dissemination, Wallenstein forges an original Bible that will justify faith and buries the real Sinai Bible in Jerusalem. His actions set into motion a bawdy, brilliant, and undeniably epic adventure that spans a century and entwines the destinies of four extraordinary men in the shifting sands of the Holy Land: Plantagenet Strongbow, an English-born adventurer who becomes a Muslim holy man and finally, on the eve of World War 1, the secret ruler of the Ottoman Empire; his son Stern, a visionary who dedicates his life to establishing an inclusive homeland in the Middle East for Jews, Muslims, and Christians; Haj Harun, a 3000-year-old warrior and antiquities dealer; and O'Sullivan Beare, an exiled Irish freedom fighter and gunrunner."

None of us had met him, except through his fiction, but we needed him. We needed him badly. Bogged down in the particularities of daily events, in the hourly newscasts and mind numbing series of military and political skirmishes, we needed someone who could soar above it all. Someone who could take the absurd reality in which we lived and weave it into a rich tapestry of realist absurdity. Now what’s this twist? thought O’Sullivan Beare. What’s going on around here? More confusion and things seem to be spinning out of control already. That item’s not English for sure, not French or German or anything natural. And armed with a bow no less, just in case a spot of archery practice turns up while he’s out for a stroll on a dreadful winter afternoon. Some bloody devious article up to no good in the Holy Land, that’s certain. By God, it’s pranks for sure and somebody’s bent on something. The World Series of Poker was shown on TV in 1973. It was celebrated in a big way as it was the first-ever televised poker event.Showing poker on TV further pushed poker into the spotlight and increased its popularity once again.

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A lonely hero still only twenty-one years old, wearing as an unlikely disguise that day the uniform of an officer of light cavalry in Her Majesty’s expeditionary force to the Crimea, 1854, the medals on his chest showing he had survived a famous suicidal charge and been awarded the Victoria Cross because of it, far from home now huddled over a glass of Arab cognac that helped not at all, finding life bleak and meaningless on that cold December afternoon, simply that. JP is the second in Whittemore's Middle East quartet but can stand (magnificently) alone. While the first book, Sinai Tapestry, introduces some of the characters who make Jerusalem Poker so memorable, it is less accomplished than JP and might not appeal to a reader who has not already been converted to diehard Whittemorism by first reading Jerusalem Poker. 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… It's a thing of beauty to watch Whittemore pull these individual story strands together into the tapestry that gives the book its title. And deep below all the surface fireworks of sentence and character and plot is the quixotic idea that the three Abrahamic religions might find a way to share their small part of the world.

A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims. 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 new novel, finally published in 1979, was Jerusalem Poker, the second volume of the Quartet. It involves a twelve-year poker game begun in the last days of December 1921 when three men sit down to play. The stakes were nothing less than the Holy City itself. Where else could a game for the control of Jerusalem be played but in the antiquities shop of Haj Harun? Actually, Ted did not come to live permanently (that is permanently according to his ways) in Jerusalem until he was well into writing the Quartet. His knowledge of Jerusalem was based initially on books, but later on he wandered endlessly through the crowded, teeming streets and Quarters of the Old City. Merchants of every kind, butchers, tanners, glass blowers, jewelers, silversmiths, and even iron mongers spoke nearly every known language and dressed in the vibrant and exotic costumes of the Middle East. I once remarked to Ted while we were making our way along a narrow passage in the Arab Quarter, that I fully expected we would run into Sinbad the Sailor coming the other way. window, document, "script", "https://95662602.adoric-om.com/adoric.js", "Adoric_Script", "adoric","9cc40a7455aa779b8031bd738f77ccf1", "data-key");At first I thought it was just druggie humour (and it IS damn funny) and then I figured maybe historical speculation with a satirical edge, until it started playing with my mundane perceptions of time, history, and causality. It's the kind of book (series) that weaves itself into your dreams.