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Unwittingly, Amy Wilentz achieved a journalist's dream with the publication of her new book - getting the first scoop on a major historical event. Published in May 2001, Martyr's Crossing revolves around the events sparked by the death of a Palestinian baby at a checkpoint, after he is refused access to medical care during a tight closure imposed by the Israeli army. Only four months later, fiction became reality and suddenly the international press was filled with stories about martyrs, closures, and dead babies at checkpoints.
As a resident of the West Bank, the book was painful to start and bitter to read. I found my own experiences of the current conflict captured in her descriptions, which my mind fleshed out into vivid reality with details from my life. At first, this shock of recognition made it difficult to view the book objectively: I found myself bridling at descriptions or resenting conclusions that sat ill with my beliefs about the Palestinian-Israeli relationship.
[Image omitted, see PDF]But, as I read on and adjusted to the eeriness of art imitating life, I found my unease had objective grounds. Wilentz does a thought-provoking job of evoking the hopes, ideals, and delusions of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples, clearly drawing upon her years as The New Yorker correspondent in Jerusalem. However, she too often achieves this by resorting to shallow characters, whose purpose is only to bring the story to its tragic and expected conclusion.
The problem lies in the book's setting. By choosing a still volatile political landscape as her backdrop, Wilentz gave herself a challenging task of bringing something fresh to a much-rehearsed history. How does one personalize the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while painting the grand picture for a presumably novice audience? The result is alternately distracting and refreshing.
Just as I had a visceral reaction to seeing a fictionalized version of my experience during the ongoing intifada, the attention of most readers will be snagged by the loosely veiled appearance of historical figures in the Palestinian and Israeli...