Jerusalem, Jerusalem: A Memoir or War and Peace, Passion and Politics

by Lesley Hazleton

In 1966, Lesley Hazleton went to Israel for a two-week vacation - she discovered the seductive city of Jerusalem and stayed for thirteen years. During this time Hazleton, a British Jew, became a seasoned journalist, experienced the Six Days War, and made her first pilgrimage through the Old City to the Western Wall. She left Israel in 1979, but it was like ending a passionate love affair: Hazleton could not break the intense emotional times that bound her to Jerusalem, and she returned year after year.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem is set during Hazleton's "farewell" visit in 1984, and it chronicles her own personal struggle to come to terms with what this troubled country means to her. Veering between the past and present, this poignant memoir traces the political and environmental changes that have transformed Israel since the Six Days War, and addresses the evergrowing conflict between religious and secular Jews. Lesley Hazleton explores the divisions of souls - Israel's and her own - as she paints an intimate, honest, and compelling portrait of a city living on the brink of war and peace.

243 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

1. My new book 'Jezebel: the untold story of the bible's harlot queen' is just out (Doubleday). Yes, she was framed. No, she was no harlot. Yes, she was magnificent.

2. Won't bore you with the whole bio -- it's in the 'About the Author' page on www.jezebelbook.com. For now: British-born, lived for a long time in the Middle East, now live in the very Pacific Northwest.

3. Favorite drink is grappa.
Natural habitat is high desert (which must have something to do with my living on a houseboat/floating home at sea level...)
Am gnostic agnostic (and yes, will write a long piece/short book explaining that one day).

Reviews

[Fai · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story of a female journalist who lives in Israel. She tells about the geo-political situation there. Her narration is only from the angle she wants about what she love and hope for the country. She never ever mentioned at all that she tried to understand the feelings of the Palestinian people who were persecuted by the government and the Israeli people themselves. If you are interested in politics, you can read this book.

However, Israel cannot deny that the Israeli land they live in is the right of the Palestinian people.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Half a book, really.

It's very much a period piece, a liberal and well-meaning grappling with the fast-increasing brutalization of Israeli society and political discourse in the 1970s and 80s (Kahane and Gush Emunim are the villains here, the latter maybe more than the former because so many of the Gush partisans Hazleton encounters are half-educated youthful zealots who can barely construct a sentence in Hebrew but are expert in the grammar of hate), from Lebanon and the ever-increasing plague of settlements to more and more open racism in political discourse. At least at this point there's still a Left to be outraged by the brutality and pointlessness of the Lebanon campaign and to turn out in numbers to resist the rightists; some of them are trying hard to envision peace (you get a visceral sense here of how powerful and unexpected a surprise Sadat's overtures provided), though many of them hope for some sort of India/Pakistan-style partition wherein all the Israeli Arabs leave. Some great meta-stuff toward the end where she ruminates about, and listens to others ruminating about (even if they give up; there's a hilarious quantity of very Jewish shrugging going on) what "Israel" even means, and if it ever could be just a normal country in its self-conception, maybe with no Law of Return. In the most meta moment, she discusses Philip Roth's visit, which he would metafiction into The Counterlife a few years later, and which he's already reflecting on and disagreeing with himself about as he visits.

But well-meaning as it is, this is essentially unable to see the other side, unless we count Anton Shammas, the prominent Arab Israeli columnist and novelist. In a turn that's entirely too symbolic, right before she leaves (Hazleton lived there much longer than she'd expected, starting in 1966, and then came back in the early 80s, which is the inciting conflict here), she comes across a nameless and acutely symbolic Arab worker, trudging back from doing...something, who throws a stone at her heel after passing her on a hill. She turns and stands her ground, well aware of herself as a stereotype of the increasingly intolerant Israeli public, and leaves him poised in anger as she walks away. She certainly seems too feisty and scrupulous a writer to make up this incident, so I'll credit her with the description, but as a symbol of the anonymity and barely-there existence accorded to the Palestinian population in an entirely well-meaning grappling with history and the self and the argumentative Jewish soul, this is just too on the nose.