Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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An author of extraordinary talents, albeit one who eludes comparison with other writers… . The milieu is one which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it’s totally transformed—by the writer’s wild humour, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of history and time. — Harper’s on Jerusalem Poker The air was warm and the desert still, the year was 1914 and the noble couple from Behind Pomerania had just fulfilled a lifelong dream of making love on the summit of the Great Pyramid at dawn, to the point of a final and exhaustive satisfaction.

Tools and services JPost Premium Ulpan Online JPost Newsletter Our Magazines Learn Hebrew RSS feed JPost.com Archive Digital Library Lists of Jewish holidays Law In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.” Find sources: "Edward Whittemore"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( December 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

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That’s apparent age. The spirit inside is dreadfully elderly and creaking, a regular tottering veteran of the wars at least eighty-five years old. The Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, remember? I’d have to be more or less that old.

Poker is now played by professionals, amateurs, both at land-based casinos and many play poker online .So, what makes poker so popular, how old is it, and what was the biggest ever poker win? Out of print for many years, all five books were reissued in 2002 by Old Earth Books. The Old Earth Books editions are now out of print, but Open Road Media announced plans to publish eBook editions of all five novels in July 2013.This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. But we were wrong. Whittemore, after a tour of duty as an officer in the Marines in Japan, was approached there by the CIA and spent the Kennedy years working for the Agency in Europe. During those years Whittemore would periodically return to New York City. What are you up to? one would ask. Oh, this and that. For a while he was running a socialist newspaper in Rome. After he left the Agency there was a stint with the Addiction Services Agency in New York City. Later, there were rumors that he had a drinking problem and that he was taking drugs. He married and divorced twice. He and his first wife had two daughters. And then there were the women he lived with after the second divorce. There were many; they all seemed to be talented—painters, photographers, writers, sculptors, and dancers. There were more rumors. He was living on Crete, he had no job, no money, he was writing. Then silence. Clearly, the fair-haired undergraduate had not gone on to fame and glory. None of it made much sense, and the history was unclear at best. The second to last chapter which covers the horrific Turkish slaughter and rape of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna in 1922 was somewhat redeeming - I learned something looking it up. At first I thought it was just druggie humour (and it IS damn funny) and then I figured maybe historical speculation with a satirical edge, until it started playing with my mundane perceptions of time, history, and causality. It's the kind of book (series) that weaves itself into your dreams. But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem.

In the end, all I can tell you is this: If you believe in fiction much as you would a religion, or if you think that great works of fiction contain insights and wisdom that can literally change your life, or if you have known books that took you on strange but wonderful journeys, then you should read Edward Whittemore. He will not disappoint you. A deaf, seven-foot-seven duke, who is both master botanist and swordsman, explores the Middle East, writes an embarrassingly comprehensive treatise on sex, and then, offended by the revocation of his title, proceeds to sell his British estate and buy the Ottoman Empire. A bastard Albanian nobleman decides one day to become a monk and subsequently discovers a copy of The Bible, New Testament included, that is a thousand years older than Christ. An infamous Irish partisan, who happens to be the 33rd child of a prophet, flees British-occupied Ireland in the guise of a nun and becomes a Middle-Eastern arms smuggler.

The war is raging all around – soldiers fight and soldiers die… But at the same time all over the world the invisible fighters of the secret services continue to fight their invisible combats… And the rest of the people are frightened and waiting for the worst… IN THE FIRST LIGHT of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise. The new novel, finally published in 1979, was Jerusalem Poker, the second volume of the Quartet. It involves a twelve-year poker game begun in the last days of December 1921 when three men sit down to play. The stakes were nothing less than the Holy City itself. Where else could a game for the control of Jerusalem be played but in the antiquities shop of Haj Harun? Actually, Ted did not come to live permanently (that is permanently according to his ways) in Jerusalem until he was well into writing the Quartet. His knowledge of Jerusalem was based initially on books, but later on he wandered endlessly through the crowded, teeming streets and Quarters of the Old City. Merchants of every kind, butchers, tanners, glass blowers, jewelers, silversmiths, and even iron mongers spoke nearly every known language and dressed in the vibrant and exotic costumes of the Middle East. I once remarked to Ted while we were making our way along a narrow passage in the Arab Quarter, that I fully expected we would run into Sinbad the Sailor coming the other way. SOME TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs officials that showed that he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States four decades before." Thus begins Quin’s Shanghai Circus; it ends with the largest funeral procession held in Asia since the thirteenth century.