Coming Home to Jerusalem: A Personal Journey

Jewish baby boomer Orange moved to Israel in the early 1990s with her young daughter as part of a midlife attempt to find herself. (Televised pictures of Israelis wearing gas masks during the 1991 Gulf War--a compelling vision for someone who grew up obsessed with the Holocaust--spurred her need to be with people) Now, the author chronicles the years she lived as a journalist in the Middle East. Though trained as a psychologist, she became a correspondent for the leftist Jewish magazine Tikkun. But in this book she is more than just an observer--she leaps into the Israeli world with a vengeance, making both Palestinian and Israeli friends, taking on a lover who is a taxicab driver. She participates in the peace movement as the euphoria of the 1993 Oslo accord gives way to the violence of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the deadly bus bombings against Jews that lead to the 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli prime minister. Along the way, Orange describes with intense earnestness the ups and downs that accompany life in the tinderbox of the Middle East. Regarding the Palestinians, whose views she seems to genuinely try to understand, she moves from fear to sympathy to rage--and back again. The reader remains unclear about the reasons for Orange's final departure from the region, but is left with a keen understanding of the grassroots frenzy that accompanies political life there and the author's own intoxication with this frenzy. Agent, Joy Harris. (June) FYI: For another immigrant's look at contemporary life in Israel, see David Horowitz's A Little Too Close to God, Forecasts, Apr. 25.