Jericho Mosaic Quotes

“And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That’s something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time’s unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? …”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“The psyche adjusts to trauma in so many different ways, we just can’t assume anything yet. But the resilience of the human spirit is a wondrous thing, truly limitless. Despair passes and anything can be born from it, anything at all. And Assaf is very young and he’s strong inside, so we’ll wait and watch and listen, and we’ll see what we can do to help him regain his footing.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“Nor is it only the natures of great men that Whittemore reveals. Like Dickens, he understands the tragedy of great souls with small destinies. And so we’re given Halim’s closest friend, Ziad, the hack-journalist and Baath party hanger-on, of whom Tajar remarks, “I wouldn’t imagine he’ll go very far. But then most people don’t … anywhere, do they?” The ellipses are Whittemore’s—and Tajar’s. The simple truth is that Ted Whittemore was one of the best and least-known writers of a lowdown, dark, and dishonest age. The books that he’s given us, beginning with Quin’s Shanghai Circus, are among the great “war novels” of our time as luminous as The Red Badge of Courage, as chastening as The Naked and the Dead. That the wars are fought without “lines” or uniforms hardly matters: the wounds go just as deep, and sometimes deeper than, bullets.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic

“INTRODUCTION IT LOOKS AND FEELS like a book, I know, but I promise you that what you hold in your hand is an axe. A paper axe, it’s true, but an axe nonetheless. I’ll explain. Jericho Mosaic is the capstone of Ted Whittemore’s Jerusalem Quartet, one of the most ambitious literary endeavors of the 20th Century. Like Robert Musil’s Man of Qualities and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Whittemore’s magnum opus explores the great themes of this and every other age. War and peace, friendship and death, loss and betrayal. Dreams. An historical novel of subtle and ferocious dimensions, Jericho Mosaic is, above all else, a tale of espionage inspired by the tragic heroism of a spy named Eli Cohen.”
― Edward Whittemore, Jericho Mosaic