Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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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. In that style, you may like Cordwainer Smith, one of the greatest masters of spec-fi with his standalone stories and novels from THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND.

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./divDIV Whittemore explores many different themes, and his meandering plots and fascinating characters are what make the books such pleasures to read.” In 1993 the WSOP Main Event poker match was the first tournament to have a prize pool of 1 million dollars. More precisely, Whittemore didn’t soar so much as tunnel. He tunneled under the surface of Jerusalem, following the three-thousand-year-old antiquities dealer Haj Harun in his tattered yellow cape and dented Crusader helmet down through the physical layers of the place—one era’s stones laid on top of the previous one’s to create a vertical history—and into the existential city, the one we really inhabited if we could only escape daily reality long enough to see it. JERUSALEM IN THE LATE SEVENTIES. Caught eternally, it seemed, between war and peace. That’s when a small group of us—writers, journalists, historians, commentators gathering every Friday in a downtown café—discovered Edward Whittemore.

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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.

window, document, "script", "https://95662602.adoric-om.com/adoric.js", "Adoric_Script", "adoric","9cc40a7455aa779b8031bd738f77ccf1", "data-key"); Bloody Arab excuse for a pub, he muttered. Just bloody awful, that’s what. Not an honest pint in the house and no one to drink it with anyway. 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. Whittemore, however, enjoys writing these stories that meander all over the place. In Jerusalem Poker, he turns to Joe’s life after Smyrna, when he, Cairo Martyr, and Munk Szondi play their epic poker game. They come together by chance, but as usual with the books, they’re connected in ways they couldn’t imagine. Cairo learned how to be a dragoman in Egypt under the tutelage of Menelik Ziwar, who was Strongbow’s best friend. Munk was descended from a Swiss explorer who settled in Hungary and married, but not before he had already gotten an obscure Albanian noblewoman pregnant, said child growing up to be Skanderbeg Wallenstein, forger of the Sinai Bible. The Swiss explorer later traveled through the Sudan and impregnated yet another woman, whose grandson was Cairo Martyr, making he and Munk distant cousins. Munk is friends with Maud, although he met her after she left Joe in Jerusalem. He also has a brief affair with the elderly grandmother of Nubar Wallenstein, who is the odd villain in the book, one who becomes obsessed with the poker game but remains largely ineffectual at destroying it. The three men spend their years becoming richer and richer but also destroying players they deem unworthy – men who buy and sell slaves, men who steal religious icons – until the game ends in 1933. It’s not quite as emotionally affecting as the first book, but Whittemore builds on the relationships established in Sinai Tapestry to add depth to the characters.A lonely hero still only twenty-one years old, wearing as an unlikely disguise that day the uniform of an officer of light cavalry in Her Majesty’s expeditionary force to the Crimea, 1854, the medals on his chest showing he had survived a famous suicidal charge and been awarded the Victoria Cross because of it, far from home now huddled over a glass of Arab cognac that helped not at all, finding life bleak and meaningless on that cold December afternoon, simply that. 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? The first book is probably my favorite, simply because Strongbow’s story is so much fun and it contains one of the most emotionally affecting pieces of writing I’ve ever read. After Strongbow leaves the book and Joe and Stern become the main characters, the action moves to 1920s Jerusalem, where Joe meets Haj Harun and Maud, the only woman who really has a major role in the books and with whom Joe has his child. Maud’s story is powerful, as she married Catherine Wallenstein, bore him a son, but escaped when his madness overcame him, then fell in love with a Greek man who was always away fighting, missing the birth and death of their child and finally dying of malaria during World War I. Maud’s fear of abandonment led to her leaving Joe with her son because she could never believe he wasn’t going to leave her first, and her betrayal led Joe to years of bitterness before they finally reconcile in Nile Shadows, 20 years after their break. Stern plots out a homeland in the Middle East for all faiths, a naïve dream that becomes more tenuous as the years go on, and Joe helps him bring guns into Palestine for the various factions he wants to help, because they all tell Stern that his dreams are great for the future but in the present they need guns. It all leads to a heartbreaking chapter at the end of the book, when Stern, Joe, and Haj Harun meet in Smyrna in September 1922 just as the Turks enter the city and begin massacring the Greeks and Armenians. Whittemore’s odd prose, which feels occasionally aloof and wry, turns dark and gut-wrenching, as the three men try to get themselves and Stern’s two friends – one of whom is the brother of the Greek man Maud fell in love with – out of the city. The story of Smyrna is tragic, and Whittemore writes about the various larger tragedies in the city as well as the very specific ones affecting the group. Joe breaks with Stern, hating his idealism in a world that can allow Smyrna to happen, and Stern eventually turns to morphine to ease the pain of his memories. The chapter is brilliant, and it provides a horrific climax to the book, one that leads directly to Stern’s death 20 years later in Cairo, an event that is the central focus of the third book, Nile Shadows. Excerpt from Jerusalem Poker 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

The first volume in Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet follows the meandering paths of several characters--to call them colorful would be to criminally under-emphasize their vivid nature--as they pursue various relics, dreams, and quests all across the Holy land and the tottering Ottoman Empire.Isildur1 had a reputation that precedes them. They would play any player and create a buzz, unlike any poker player before them. By 1981, Whittemore was living in a studio apartment on Third Avenue in New York City. And he was writing steadily. I had left Holt earlier that spring for another publishing house and a young colleague, Judy Karasik, took over the editorial work on Whittemore’s new novel, Nile Shadows. After Ted died, she wrote the epilogue to this novel. It is one of the most moving accounts of an editor’s working and personal relationship with an author I have ever read. She should have given it as a eulogy at Whittemore’s funeral twelve years after Nile Shadows appeared. Scraps from a magical book that’s always being written? Or was written once? Or will be written someday?”