Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. 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. And spies live perilously… They hunt for secrets… They always live under the unbearable psychological stress… They are always in fear… They have nowhere to run… Their private lives lie in ruins…

THE GREAT JERUSALEM POKER Game for secret control of the city, the ruin of so many adventurers in the period between the two world wars, continued for twelve years before it finally spent itself.If the price of whiskey goes up again and the wife leaves me, I'll sit down and reread this book." -- Hugh Murphy, reader, County Donegal If you had to describe the novel in one line, you could say it’s about a twelve-year poker game for control of the holy city. But that, of course, is only the top layer, as you realize if you take just the three main players in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game: Moslem, Christian, and Jew.

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.Sinai Tapestry is a seminal work of speculative fiction and one that everyone must read. I'm giving this book the highest possible recommendation. For the Junker baron and baroness, and for Martyr as well, the nineteenth century had abruptly come to an end in that early summer dawn in 1914, although elsewhere in the world a few more weeks were to pass before the radical new state of affairs was generally recognized. Isildur1 had a reputation that precedes them. They would play any player and create a buzz, unlike any poker player before them. 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

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] Glistening sweat and decaying fat. Sunrise. Cairo Martyr puffed lazily and turned his gaze north when he heard the distant drone of an airplane.No it can’t, that’s true. But all things considered I’m still feeling glum today. Gloomy and glum and that’s a fact. 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. And that’s the truth, thought O’Sullivan Beare. Devious pranks sneaking out of the mists of central Europe and lurking on every side. Right you are and I could see that mischief coming.