Word: jerusalem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Christopher Lucas is an American journalist living in Jerusalem and looking for a story. He has quit his "comfortable and rather prestigious newspaper job" and now scrambles as a free-lancer. This job change has left him unsettled: "It was so hard to get it right, working without the assignment, the rubric, the refuge of a word count. No one behind...
Inventing a terrorist conspiracy and then setting it in contemporary Jerusalem may seem a coals-to-Newcastle sort of enterprise. Why bother with make-believe when the reality is so vivid and convoluted? Robert Stone provides an engrossing answer in his sixth novel, Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin; 500 pages; $26). All of Stone's previous fiction has featured heroes whose problems are implicitly religious. Their pathologies--the heavy ingestion of drugs and booze, the habit of seeking or stumbling into serious, life-threatening trouble--stem from their uneasy sense that God still exists, but not for them. Damascus Gate makes...
Another problem Lucas faces is that everyone he meets in Jerusalem asks him about his religion. The question troubles him because he can answer it only in the past tense: "My father was a nonpracticing Jew. My mother was a sentimental Catholic." What he has inherited from his parents continues to elude...
Early in the story Lucas hears of Dr. Pinchas Obermann, who treats victims of the Jerusalem Syndrome. The journalist hears the term from a friend and asks, "Which is?" The reply: "Which is coming here and God gives you a mission. To Christians like your good self, only crazy ones." Lucas later meets Obermann and accompanies him on his rounds with his hospitalized patients: "They met some famous figures from Scripture. Noah was present, glancing uneasily at the smoggy sky. Samson, unbound but closely supervised in a room of his own, sneered at Lucas's philistine lack of conditioning...
...time when U.S. politicians, despite their misgivings, fell in behind the White House in its dealings with foreign countries has long gone: Newt Gingrich arrives in Israel tomorrow, and his guns are already blazing -- at President Clinton. An op-ed article he wrote for today?s Jerusalem Post offers reasons for the Netanyahu government to reject Washington?s compromise ultimatum on troop withdrawal from the West Bank. ?[Israel] cannot replace its generals' judgments on security concerns with the optimism of those who have never faced a threat to their survival,? wrote Gingrich...