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Review of Amy Wilentz's Martyr's Crossing
(New York: Simon & Schuster), 2001, 311 pps.

Rabbi Charles L. Arian

On a rainy night at a West Bank checkpoint, Marina Raad Hajimi is trying to bring her very ill three-year-old son into Israel proper for medical treatment. Lieut. Ari Doron, the checkpoint's commander, is ordered by higher-ups in Tel Aviv not to let them through. No Palestinians are to be let in under any circumstances; in addition, Marina's husband is a jailed Hamas terrorist.

Doron struggles with his conscience and decides to defy orders. He lets them through, but it is too late. The child dies.

Veteran journalist Amy Wilentz's first novel, Martyr's Crossing, deals with the fallout from this incident. The cast of characters presents a broad cross-section of Israeli and Palestinian society. On the Israeli side you have Ari Doron, the young lieutenant struggling with the guilt he feels for his role in the boy's death; his cynical commanding officer Yizhar; and Ari's doting Jewish mother. Among the Palestinians are American-born Marina; her Christian Arab father George, a renowned Boston cardiologist and opponent of the corrupt Palestinian Authority; Marina's terrorist husband Hassan; and George's boyhood friend Mahmoud, an official of the same Authority that George detests.

It would have been easy to turn this material into
either a one-sided polemic or a parade of stereotypes (or both). That Wilentz manages to avoid doing so is a credit to her journalistic skill. She manages to make us understand and care about all of her characters, even as we detest some of their behaviors and motivations.

Those who are convinced that responsibility for the current bloodshed in the Middle East lies entirely on one side or the other will most likely be angered by this book. Wilentz's Israelis and Palestinians are often flawed and shortsighted, but they are not the embodiments of evil which partisans of one side are often convinced that those on the other side are.

Wilentz served as the New Yorker Jerusalem correspondent from 1995 - 1997 and her familiarity with the geography of Jerusalem shows. Her word pictures of people and places, which I know well, rang true.

This is clearly a first novel; it reads more like a work of journalism than a work of fiction. Wilentz's writing is not first-rate but her story telling is. Martyr's Crossing serves to remind us that when nations and ideologies clash, it is individuals who pay the price.

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