Peter Wortsman and the Middle East

By Nesreen | May 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

1001 Middle Easts:

Introductory remarks to my Reading from Encounters with the Middle East at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, April 26, 2008

By Peter Wortsman, author of Encounters story, “Holy Land Blues.” Peter’s piece was also selected for The Best Travel Writing 2008: True Stories From Around the World (Travelers’ Tales)

“What is your first memory?” I asked my mother in our last conversation, several days before she died.

“War,” she said, shaking her head.

“Why do you shake your head?” I asked.

“Stupid world,” she said.

She had her wits about her and knew that the madness was raging again.

My very first thought upon hearing reports of the American invasion of Basra in Iraq was: That’s Sinbad’s city! And suddenly Iraq had a face and a voice and a soul, the soul of a great seafaring man, my all-time hero, whispering from the grave: “I rendered thanks to Allah for rescuing me from my ordeal, and soon my past sufferings were no more than half-forgotten dreams.”

My take on the Middle East is sandwiched in between the covers of Shahrazad’s intricately woven tapestry of life-preserving tales. What more powerful incantation than a narrative! Stories may not protect against guided missiles, cluster or suicide bombs, but they do protect against the defilement of the soul and remind that the human heart beats at the same rate on both sides of the border.

I am honored and delighted to have had my words included in this fine book. Almost every page of Encounters resonates with an extremely specific personality of place. It’s a cliché buster, in the best sense, a book that portrays people and places with no halos and all the rough edges, but also, and above all, with those sparks that, when warped, ignite wars, and when cherished, cause bushes to sputter with wisdom and conflicting sanctities to reveal a common source.

As a Jew, I have always felt like a nomad at heart, a Bedouin in blue jeans. And though my immediate forbears lived in and were later forced to flee Central Europe, I have always felt in the pit of my gut like a misplaced Mediterranean—my hair and nose and my need to be on the move are a dead giveaway. I felt it in Israel back in the Seventies. I felt it again in the souks of Morocco, immediately mastering the art of the deal.

But my link to the region transcends nostalgia.

In my family, we will always remember, especially at the Passover Seder which we celebrated again last week, that it was an Egyptian Moslem, my Uncle Hussein, the husband of my Aunt Risa, who helped bring my mother’s family out of bondage and save them from Hitler’s death machine.

“Holy Land Blues” is an account of a visit I took to Israel back in the Seventies, rife with premonitions of things to come. It was just before Sadat made his historic landing on the tarmac on Israeli soil. I was also due to visit Egypt, where my aunt still lived at the time, but relatives in Israel warned that war was imminent. As it turned out, the rumblings did not escalate into war, and though I never made it to Egypt, I did meet Sanah Hassan, an Egyptian journalist, on a kibbutz in Israel, whose visit predated that of her late president.

Not long thereafter, Sadat landed. And just when the prospect of peace appeared within reach, the assassinations of Sadat and Rabin followed.

I am no diplomat or politician, but I do believe in the power of narrative to traverse borders of distrust. In the words of the wise Shahrazad: “Then I will tell you a tale, which, if Allah wills, shall be the means of our deliverance.”