Crossing Mandelbaum Gate
Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978
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3.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
*From the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus—the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer*
Now with a new introduction, Kai Bird’s fascinating memoir of his early years spent in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon provides an original and illuminating perspective into the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In 1956, four-year-old Kai Bird, son of a charming American diplomat, moved to Jerusalem with his family. Kai could hear church bells and the Muslim call to prayer and watch as donkeys and camels competed with cars for space on the narrow streets. Each day on his way to school, Kai was driven through Mandelbaum Gate, where armed soldiers guarded the line separating Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem from Arab-controlled East.
Bird would spend much of his life crossing such lines—as a child in Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and later, as a young man in Lebanon. In Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, a narrative that “rips along like a spy novel” (The New York Times Book Review), Bird’s retelling of “events such as Suez in 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, and Black September in 1970 are as clear and fresh as yesterday” (The Spectator, UK). Bird vividly portrays emblematic figures like George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening; Jordan’s King Hussein; the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled; Salem bin Laden; Saudi King Faisal; President Nasser of Egypt; and Hillel Kook, the forgotten rescuer of more than 100,000 Jews during World War II.
Bird, his parents sympathetic to Palestinian self-determination and his wife the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, has written a “kaleidoscopic and captivating” (Publishers Weekly) personal history of a troubled region and an indispensable addition to the literature on the modern Middle East.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bird, Pulitzer Prize winning coauthor of American Prometheus, offers a compelling hybrid of memoir and history, weaving together recollections of his childhood in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; the stories of his wife s Holocaust survivor parents; and rigorous scholarship on the region. The book s title Mandelbaum Gate once separated Israeli-controlled Western Jerusalem from the Jordanian-controlled East indicates a view on the conflict, and it s certainly that, but it s also much more: readers are given ringside seats to Cairo under Nasser, the author s American family s friends (including Osama bin Laden s elder brother), and Bird s years in India and the U.S. during the heyday of the antiwar movement of the 60s. Notable events and figures (airplane hijacker Leila Khaled, for example, or the Palestinian-Jordanian battles known as Black September) are given detailed treatment and their continuing resonance is made clear. Bird s brushes with history his first girlfriend was held hostage on an airplane hijacked to win Khaled s release, for instance brings home the deeply messy humanity of the stories he binds together in this kaleidoscopic and captivating book.
