Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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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 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. Whittemore explores many different themes, and his meandering plots and fascinating characters are what make the books such pleasures to read.” Whittemore’s colorful characters … wrestle fitfully with meaninglessness, time, and the grim realities of war… . As in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, characters return in name and shape through their progeny, while people, events, and certain phrases are regularly reintroduced, giving you the feeling that you are wandering through a labyrinth of memory." — The Voice Literary Supplement In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Publishers Weekly called him our best unknown novelist. Jim Hougan, writing in Harper’s Magazine, said Whittemore was one of the last, best arguments against television…. He is an author of extraordinary talents…. The milieu is one in which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally transformed by the writer’s wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of time and history.

IN THE FIRST LIGHT of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise. 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.If this is, as we are assured, Whittemore’s greatest work, then you need not read the rest. Having said that, why rate it as three stars? It hints at more than it delivers, but what it does deliver has the possibility of opening new worlds of thought, if not history and introspection.

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. There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that the disparate parts of Ted’s world came together, perhaps for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with their own families (but not Ted’s former wives or the two daughters who had flown to New York to say goodbye); there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any spooks in attendance? One really can’t say, but there were eight spooks of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were, of course, there. Sinai Tapestry is a seminal work of speculative fiction and one that everyone must read. I'm giving this book the highest possible recommendation. 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. Bloody Greeks and Persians and Jews and Arabs and Turks and Crusaders, there’s no end to it. And the odd bloated Mameluke floating down the Nile and the odd mad Mongolian whipping his horse into a frenzy, barbarians on their way in as usual to mix it up with assorted Assyrian charioteers and crazed Babylonians intent on the stars, while all the while the Chaldeans are sweeping in on the flanks and the Medes are sweeping out, and the Phoenicians are counting their money and the Egyptians are counting their gods, maybe the high priests of both of them getting together every millennium or so, to compare notes and see if either of them has come up with more of one than the other.

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A major hole in the book for me is Stern himself. Whittemore handles the mystery, the ambiguity, the paranoia, the charismatic cult around this unknowable shadowy figure well, but when the actual dude finally does show up... He just doesn't seem all that interesting. He is just this guy, you know. (Have to furnish your own German psychoanalyst accent.) His appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions: which Joe frustratingly doesn't seem to want to ask. And it really does feel like a deflation. But no, after this section and the novel goes on, and Joe doesn't seem to have changed his view of Stern. That was a let down for me, though I guess it is equally possible that I missed the point on my rather fragmented first reading. (I'm sure there is a whole graduate thesis to be done on all the pillars of smoke in this novel, all leading to the columns of smoke coming from the Nazi death-camps.) In 1993 the WSOP Main Event poker match was the first tournament to have a prize pool of 1 million dollars. Scraps from a magical book that’s always being written? Or was written once? Or will be written someday?” 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'.

First, Cairo Martyr, the Nubian dragoman with pale blue eyes who has made a fortune selling mummy dust cut with quinine as an aphrodisiac. Then Joe O’Sullivan Beare, an Irish patriot who now smuggles arms for the Haganah inside giant hollow scarabs, and trades in sacred phallic amulets. And then Munk Szondi, the scion of a powerful Budapest-based banking house run by a matriarchal directorate known as The Sarahs, who trades in futures—any and all futures. Indeed you do, murmured the European thoughtfully. A case of excellent recall. Munk Szondi’s my name. From Budapest. 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."Poker has been around since 1829 and started in New Orleans by French settlers. The game involved bluffing your way to a win or bets originally called ‘Poques’, which was similar to today's draw poker. Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me. Could he come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver the long-awaited manuscript. There had been two false starts after Jericho Mosaic. Instead Ted told me he was dying. Would I be his literary executor? A year or so earlier Ted had been diagnosed as having prostate cancer. It was too far along for an operation. His doctor had prescribed hormones and other medication and the cancer had gone into remission. But now it had spread. Less than six months later he was dead. They were terrible months for him. However, during those last weeks and days while he slipped in and out of consciousness, he was looked after by Carol, who had never really left his life. Twelve years of ferocious poker for the highest of stakes after an initial hand was dealt by chance one cold December day in 1921—seemingly by chance, to pass the time that gray afternoon in Jerusalem when the sky was heavily overcast and wind whipped through the alleys, snow definitely in the air. Edward Whittemore was such a writer! IMO, the Jerusalem Quartet (of which Sinai Tapestry is the first volume) is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Practically no-one has read it. Here's Jeff Vandermeer's recommendation.