Martyrs' Crossing

“At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East. . . . [Wilentzs] prose tugs at the reader. . . . The characters are magnetic. . . . [This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution.”

–Entertainment Weekly

“SO PRECISE, SO STARTLING, SO UNFORGETTABLE. . . . These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live.”

–Los Angeles Times

“MAGNIFICENT . . . Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent of The New Yorkers highest ambitions: crystalline, pure, faultlessly communicative. . . . Like the best documentaries, Martyrs Crossing allows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world.”

–Chicago Tribune

“A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED MEDIDATION ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . . Martyrs Crossing matches Damascus Gate in the quality of research and the mass of intriguing characters–and yet it remains a lean thriller.”

–The New York Observer

One rainy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, Israeli Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young Palestinian mother and her sick boy. The incident leads to a series of riots, and Doron finds himself pulled into the bitter political aftermath as battles and bus bombs explode around him.

He is drawn to Marina, the boy's American-born mother. And though she is on the other side of the bloody struggle, she finds herself thinking of Doron as "her soldier." In another place, at another time, they might have been lovers, but here their story moves toward a tragic conclusion with the kind of inevitability that war imposes.

Marina's father, an eminent Boston heart specialist and an outspoken Palestinian intellectual, is also sucked into the conflict he thought he had left behind long ago. Now, back in the streets of his youth, he must choose whether to support his old comrades as they manipulate his grandson's story in an ugly propaganda campaign, or break with them and wreck his last remaining childhood friendship.

Caught in history's terrible catastrophe, all three become pawns for larger, inescapable forces.

Martyrs' Crossing is a poignant story of the ambiguities of war — of inarticulate longing and broken vows — set in the turbulence of Israel and the West Bank.