Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 - Hardcover

Bird, Kai

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416544402 ISBN 13: 9781416544401

Publisher: Scribner, 2010

Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER 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.

Weeks before the Suez War of 1956, four-year-old Kai Bird, son of a garrulous, charming American Foreign Service officer, moved to Jerusalem with his family. They settled in a small house, where young 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. He had a front-seat view to both sides of a divided city—and the roots of the widening conflict between Arabs and Israelis.

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. Crossing Mandelbaum Gate is his compelling personal history of growing up an American in the midst of three major wars and three turbulent decades in the Middle East. The Zelig-like Bird brings readers into such conflicts as the Suez War, the Six Day War of 1967, and the Black September hijackings in 1970 that triggered the Jordanian civil war. Bird vividly portrays such emblematic figures as the erudite George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening; Jordan’s King Hussein; the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled; Salem bin Laden, Osama’s older brother and a family friend; 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 masterful and highly accessible book—at once a vivid chronicle of a life spent between cultures as well as a consummate history of a region in turmoil. It is an indispensable addition to the literature on the modern Middle East.

About this title

About the Author:

Kai Bird is the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. His other books include The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992) and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). Bird’s many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A contributing editor of The Nation, he lives in Kathmandu, Nepal, with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Jerusalem


On the eve of the Suez War in 1956, soon after we arrived, my father observed in a letter to his parents: “Once more we can cross freely through Mandelbaum Gate and once again every day we remark about the contrast between an energetically determined Israel and a stubborn, colorful and slowly progressing Jordan.... One side is willing and capable of doing the job. The other is still almost feudal, clannish and with a ‘baksheesh’ (personal charity approaching graft) mentality.”

My parents came to Jerusalem as blank slates.

My father and mother spent their formative years in Eugene, Oregon, a town of fewer than 20,000 people. Oddly enough, my father was named Eugene, although everyone called him “Bud.” The Great Depression hit his parents hard. My paternal grandparents had met in Montana, where they had laid claim to separate, neighboring tracts of land under the Homestead Act. For seven years they scratched out a living growing wheat, until its sinking market price forced them to sell the land and move to Oregon. During the Depression my grandfather worked for the local dairy in Eugene—owned by the family of the novelist Ken Kesey.

My father graduated from high school in 1943 and was lucky to be chosen by the Navy for officer training—and by the time he was commissioned, the war was over. He had known my mother, Jerine, in high school, but they didn’t start dating until after my mother’s fiancé died when his Navy ship was sunk in a Pacific typhoon. By then, Bud and Jerine were both enrolled at the University of Oregon.

My mother’s father, Chad Newhouse, had survived gassing in World War I, and spent his working life as an accountant and insurance salesman. His wife, Bernice Haines, worked for two decades at Quackenbushes, the local hardware-and-housewares store. I remember as a child marveling at the old-fashioned wire pulley contraption which the cashier used to send customers their change from a second-floor cage. Bernice—or “Bee,” as we called her—could remember a time when Indians on horseback still roamed the plains of eastern Washington where she grew up. Chad had a family Bible that had come across the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon.

They were all pretty ordinary, small-town Americans. They worked hard, and had very little money. My mother went to a Disciples of Christ church and sang in the choir. My father was raised a Christian Scientist. But in 1948 a Baptist minister married them in the Congregational church. After years of shopping around, they eventually became Episcopalians. I was born in Eugene on September 2, 1951. Father named me after Kai-Yu Hsu, a refugee from Communist China whom he had befriended at the University of Oregon. “Kai” means “mustard” in Mandarin Chinese, and “Kai-Yu” suggests someone who adds “spice” to life.

Father was boyishly handsome. When he grinned, he exposed his one physical flaw—the badly crooked teeth of an adolescent too poor to go to the orthodontist. In high school he had edited the school newspaper and joined a local chapter of the Sea Scouts, so he learned to sail on nearby lakes and up north in Puget Sound. When he began dating Jerine at the University of Oregon, he’d often take her out sailing—and bring along his best friend, Bob Naper, who later joined the CIA.

Jerine had that scrubbed, open-faced look of the 1940s, with wide, trusting eyes and brown curly locks. She had played the piano on the local Eugene radio station at the age of seven, and in her university days she regularly played the organ at her local church. She had lived in California as a young child, but that was the full extent of her travels until she married Bud—when he then took her to Stockholm on a year abroad for his graduate studies in history. My parents had nothing in their upbringing to prepare them for the Middle East.

After finishing his master’s in history at the University of Oregon in 1952, my father was awarded a Rockefeller Internship with the State Department. That autumn we moved to Washington, DC—and Father passed the Foreign Service exam. But by 1952 the Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, had forced a hiring freeze at the State Department, charging that “pinkos” from Harvard and Yale had infiltrated the Foreign Service. Two years passed before Father was finally offered an appointment to the Foreign Service.

In the meantime, the Department had by sheer chance assigned him to serve his internship on the Israel-Jordan desk. He worked under a veteran Arabist, Donald Bergus. With fewer than 600 officers, the Foreign Service was an elite “old boy” institution, the civil service of the American foreign policy establishment. Most of Father’s colleagues were bluebloods from the East Coast: white, male and Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Many had been schooled at Phillips Exeter Academy or similar preparatory schools and had then attended an Ivy League college. And within this elite institution the area specialists, particularly those who specialized in difficult languages like Arabic, were a select group.

In the spring of 1956, Father was appointed vice-consul at the American consulate in the Jordanian-controlled part of Jerusalem. His job would be to handle visa and consular affairs for Americans visiting Jordan—and to report on the Jordanian monarchy’s activities in both Jerusalem and the West Bank. We would live among the Arabs of East Jerusalem. To his innocent eyes, Jerusalem was the Holy Land. He wrote home to his parents about the wonderment he felt walking the same streets where the historical Jesus had walked two thousand years earlier.

Father was young and filled with an innate optimism about the postwar world. Just before leaving for Jerusalem, he spent three days observing a meeting of the Security Council at the United Nations. After listening to the speeches with a headphone over his ears, he waxed philosophical in a letter home: “It seems to me the world is so closely linked together that there shouldn’t be any cause for war or even misunderstandings.” But then he saw evidence that this was not true: “Our little five-foot, mustachioed ambassador from Jordan refused to sit next to Israel’s ambassador, Abba Eban. He kept an empty seat between himself and the Jew at the conference table.”

At thirty-one, my father was garrulous and charmingly informal in manner. He was also very much a married man. “I know that I love you,” he wrote Jerine after his arrival in Jerusalem, “when there is a feeling of relief and a single sharp jab of joy when your letters are handed to me.” (He had gone ahead to find a house.) Mother hated to be separated from him, and her own letters could be equally passionate: “The love thoughts tumble out too quickly to capture with pen and paper. I can only say, I love you, lover.” In their few weeks of separation he complained about his “gay but monkish existence.” He was, in fact, a shameless extrovert. “This life is no place for one who does not thoroughly enjoy meeting people,” he warned my slightly more shy and sheltered mother. One evening after dinner at the Greek consul general’s home he played charades with a French newsman, a balding British diplomat and the widow of the man who earlier that spring had been hanged for the 1951 assassination of Jordan’s King Abdullah. “She is German,” Father wrote, “has adopted the Muslim religion, is thoroughly opportunistic, and apparently well liked.... She also is about the most seductive looking blonde one will encounter anywhere. I have placed on the shelf her kind offer to help me look for a house.” (Someone—presumably Mother—had underlined in pencil the words “on the shelf.”)

Even then, as a lowly vice-consul on his first posting, he took delight in crossing social boundaries. “The life here may seem hectic to you,” he warned Mother. “But if we can regulate ourselves to the slightly madcap atmosphere and refuse to be disturbed by rank consciousness—I am by far the best antidote against that this society has seen in a long while—nor by snippy old ladies and slinky young ones, it will be a charming existence.”

Mother arrived a few weeks later, bringing my little sister, Nancy, and me. The three of us flew from Washington, DC, to Beirut aboard a twenty-one-seat Pan American Airways DC-3, a propeller plane with a cruising speed of 180 miles per hour. After spending one night in Beirut, we boarded a smaller aircraft and flew into Jerusalem’s tiny Kalandia Airport. Every time a plane landed or took off, police had to stop the traffic on the road from Jerusalem to Kalandia because the runway crossed the road. Father met us with a consulate car and drove us to the American Colony Hostel, then a quaint bed-and-breakfast lodge in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Now it is a luxury boutique hotel and boasts the favored bar and restaurant for East Jerusalem’s expatriate community of diplomats and journalists.

The American Colony was our home that first summer of 1956 in Jerusalem. My earliest memories stem from this stone building and its rose garden. From that day to the present, the Colony has always been my Jerusalem. To live there was to partake of its history as a way station, a genteel expatriate haven in the midst of Arab Jerusalem. We had a two-bedroom suite with daily maid service and three meals a day delivered to our rooms—or we could eat in the Colony’s grand dining room. In the late afternoons and evenings dozens of expatriates and Palestinian intellectuals mingled in the “big salon,” sitting in overstuffed armchairs under an elaborate Damascene ceiling hand-painted with gold leaf. In the flagstone courtyard there was a water fountain surrounded by palm trees, potted plants, ivy geraniums and pungent jasmine.

This lovely courtyard remains one of the most serene spots in Jerusalem. A high rock wall stretched from Sheikh Jarrah all the way to Mandelbaum Gate, dividing the city. But from the second- and third-story windows of the American Colony one could gaze across an open field of no-man’s-land and into Israel. For some reason that summer the Israelis decided to clear a nearby minefield dating from the 1948 war. This meant blowing up as many as eighteen large antitank mines daily. On one occasion hot iron landed in the garden across the street.

* * *

The American Colony was run by Mrs. Bertha Spafford Vester, a seventy-eight-year-old American matriarch. The image of this formidable woman presiding over the Colony’s dinner table constitutes one of my earliest memories. Vester had come to Jerusalem in 1881, when she was three years old. Her father, Horatio Gates Spafford, a well-to-do lawyer from Chicago, had moved his family to Jerusalem, seeking a simple religious way of life. Together with sixteen other Americans and a handful of Swedish-American immigrants, the Spaffords founded what the local population came to call the American Colony. Their intent was to live a spare, austere life, sharing everything in common. They called themselves the Overcomers, and they believed the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. As evidence, they cited the increasing numbers of Jews then flocking to Palestine—in their view, a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that the Jews would return to their land shortly before the Second Coming.

At that time, in the 1880s, the total population of Jerusalem was no more than 35,000, and nearly everyone lived inside the walled Old City, whose gates were closed at sunset and reopened at sunrise. By the turn of the century, the city had grown to about 50,000, of which a slight majority were Jews, with the remainder being evenly split between Christian and Muslim Arabs.

Though a Holy City to three major religions, Jerusalem was in reality a bleak, inhospitable stony landscape. Its harsh bright light reflected all that stone. When Herman Melville visited in 1857, he noted in his diary, “Stones to right and stones to left ... stony tombs; stony hills & stony hearts.” In 1867 another visitor, Mark Twain, called Jerusalem “the knobbiest town in the world, except Constantinople.” Even the ancient olive trees, planted amid row after row of stone terraces, seem covered with limestone dust. Living conditions, moreover, were anything but pristine. Open sewers stank, garbage and filth lined the narrow stone streets, and most of the city’s residents lived in cramped and squalid quarters.

Still, at the beginning of the last century Jerusalem’s skyline must have been magnificent. Every rooftop appeared to have at least one and sometimes as many as a half-dozen dirty white plastered domes made of stone. Seen from the east, from atop Mount Scopus, the Old City gleamed not only with its gray-white city walls but also from the golden hue of the seventhcentury Dome of the Rock and the turquoise tiles of the shrine’s octagonal outer walls. Outside the city walls, in the valley of Gethsemane, sat a Russian Orthodox church with its distinctive onion-shaped domes. Elsewhere on the stony skyline stood Christian bell towers, Muslim minarets and the arched remnants of ancient Roman and Crusader ruins.

The Spaffords rented a large home just inside the Old City. They opened a butcher shop, a bakery, a metal shop and a photographic business. The Colony was run as a Protestant commune. By the turn of the century, it was home to more than 120 men, women and children. Eventually, the community bought a cluster of handsome stone houses at 26 Nablus Road, about a half mile north of Damascus Gate. A wealthy merchant, Rabah al-Husseini, had built the main property in the years 1865-1876. Husseini and his four wives occupied the two-story mansion until his death in the 1890s. The Husseini clan then leased, and later sold, the property to the Spaffords.

By then, the Spaffords and their American Colony had become an integral part of Jerusalem’s social and political life. It was neutral ground, the one place in the city where intellectuals and clerics of any creed might meet with other Christian sects or Palestinian Muslims or Jews. Over the decades the Colony organized numerous charitable ventures, including an orphanage and hospital in the Old City. In 1920 an American reporter described the colony as: “A noble band of American men and women [living in] a lonely outpost of American civilization in a strange far-off land ...” The Spaffords’ daughter, Bertha, married another member of the Colony, Frederick Vester—a German-Swiss national born in Palestine.

In the 1920s Bertha Vester took control of the Colony and, distancing herself from her parents’ idiosyncratic religious views and the messianic outlook in which she had been raised, focused instead on “good deeds.” Bertha would wield enormous influence over Jerusalem society throughout the following decades.

In the early years, the Overcomers had strong and diverse ties to Jerusalem’s Jewish community. Indeed, their religious millennialism made them early promoters of the Zionist dream of a Jewish homecoming—though, of course, they also believed, like today’s Christian Zionists, that the Jews would have to convert to Christianity to be saved when Christ arrived. Horatio Spafford often visited the Western Wall (or “Wailing Wall”), and encouraged various rabbis to drop by the Colony’s “Big House” to discuss religion. One frequent nonrabbinic...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1416544402
• ISBN 13: 9781416544401
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448