Book review: What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? by David Harris-Gershon
David Harris-Gershon and his wife, Jamie, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew and study Jewish law. They went there in hope - with Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak at Camp David - but found themselves in a place torn apart by violence.
by David Harris-Gershon
Oneworld
4 stars
David Shariatmadari
David Harris-Gershon and his wife, Jamie, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew and study Jewish law. They went there in hope - with Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak at Camp David - but found themselves in a place torn apart by violence.
They found a haven in the Hebrew University, a place that they believed was immune, where Arabs and Jews and foreigners studied together.
Harris-Gershon's book, his debut, pivots on the moment his wife and her two friends are blown up in the university cafe. Ben and Marla are killed. Jamie, who had bent down beneath her table to retrieve a textbook, survives, badly burned and her intestines punctured by one of the metal nuts placed around the bomb.
The couple find it impossible to rebuild their lives in Israel, and the dreams they had of studying and thriving there are riven by post-traumatic stress disorder and the loss of their friends.
Back home, the effects of the bomb reverberate, even as Jamie becomes pregnant and the two settle back into the relative safety of life in Washington, DC. The psychological consequences for Harris-Gershon are more insidious. He suffers from terrible insomnia, and obsesses to an unnatural degree about the safety of their newborn.