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September 29, 2002
SYNDICATED: Best eaten cold
In the winter of 1986 an American tourist making his way alone up the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s old city was shot in the head by a Palestinian gunman. Some months later his daughter, a Harvard undergraduate, wrote a poem about the shooting of her father for one of her assignments. The last verse ended with a promise to her father to find the gunman. Then she shelved the poem along with her other college memorabilia — and moved on.
David Blumenfeld was lucky. The bullet merely cleaved his scalp. Had there been half an inch difference in the angle of the gunman’s aim, he would be dead. His daughter Laura graduated and went on to become a successful journalist writing for the Washington Post. Twelve years later, she uncovers the poem as she is about to depart on her honeymoon year to Israel. She decides to track down the gunman.
At the start of this remarkable memoir, Laura Blumenfeld confesses that she never really overcame the emotions aroused by the attempt on her father’s life, and had nursed revenge fantasies about it. She collects together various stories, drawn from encounters with people who have sought revenge. The majority come from the Arab and Jewish communities, cultures saturated in tales of faith-sanctioned vengeance.
Blumenfeld’s search takes her to places where revenge is an obsession. In Albania there is codified revenge. Feuds are passed from generation to generation, vengeance a filial duty governed by a fifteenth century canon, which is in turn interpreted by a blood feud committee. How much revenge is enough? she asks the widow of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated by a rightwing Jewish extremist: “There’s not enough revenge in the entire world”, comes the reply.
Blumenfeld’s research leads her around to her starting point. The attempt on her father’s life, she discovers, was neither a single nor a random act of violence, but part of a campaign to kill tourists. Compulsive and meticulous, she traces the threads that connect a series of shootings, as did Gabriel Garcia Marquez in News of a kidnapping. In Germany, Wales and Jerusalem, she finds relatives and victims who have found their own ways of coping.
The law’s attempt to civilize the raw need for revenge satisfies public but not individual wants. Rachel, Blumenfeld’s best friend, is needlingly sceptical about her endeavour. It is she, the younger daughter, persistent in the face of tradition, armed with a pen and not a sword, who seeks the vengeance that nobody but she really seems to want.
Describing herself only as a journalist writing a book, she makes contact with the family of the gunman, who is serving a prison sentence for the crime for which he was convicted, and becomes a regular visitor to their home. Never suspecting who she is, they even take her on a visit to the prison where he is being held to exchange letters, smuggled to him by the unsuspecting relatives. She joins the Palestinian crowds at a prisoner exchange, and finds herself disappointed that he is not among those released. She realises how close to the gunman and his family she has become: “It was awkward, I felt guilty, they were so nice, they hated Jews so.”
Blumenfeld’s drive to understand revenge leads her towards an examination of the emotional converse: empathy, compassion. Her decision to reveal her true identity leads to the denouement, which is all the more touching for her inability to get it quite right. —Dawn/Guardian news service
Revenge
By Laura Blumenfeld
Picador
382pp. £10.99
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