Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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Card games have been an excellent way for people to spend time for hundreds of thousands of years.Playing cards were invented in China before AD1000, and they made their way to the EU in 1360. One of the oldest card game references is a game called the 'leaf game'. In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Publishers Weekly called him our best unknown novelist. Jim Hougan, writing in Harper’s Magazine, said Whittemore was one of the last, best arguments against television…. He is an author of extraordinary talents…. The milieu is one in which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally transformed by the writer’s wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of time and history. 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. During that time thousands of gamblers from around the world lost fortunes trying to win the Holy City, but in the end there were only three men at the table, the same three who had been there in the beginning.

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.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. 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 Jerusalem and Haj Harun are just two of the beguiling characters conjured by Whittemore's inventive and original mind. Szondi, Martyr and O'Sullivan Beare, and a host of minor players, some weird, some mad, all memorable, career through history, adventure, misadventure, tragedy, love and time to end up somehow entangled in the affairs of the ancient city. Poker has been around since 1829 and started in New Orleans by French settlers. The game involved bluffing your way to a win or bets originally called ‘Poques’, which was similar to today's draw poker. Yes. The Japanese samurai used them in the Middle Ages. And that little creature asleep on your shoulder? A major hole in the book for me is Stern himself. Whittemore handles the mystery, the ambiguity, the paranoia, the charismatic cult around this unknowable shadowy figure well, but when the actual dude finally does show up... He just doesn't seem all that interesting. He is just this guy, you know. (Have to furnish your own German psychoanalyst accent.) His appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions: which Joe frustratingly doesn't seem to want to ask. And it really does feel like a deflation. But no, after this section and the novel goes on, and Joe doesn't seem to have changed his view of Stern. That was a let down for me, though I guess it is equally possible that I missed the point on my rather fragmented first reading. (I'm sure there is a whole graduate thesis to be done on all the pillars of smoke in this novel, all leading to the columns of smoke coming from the Nazi death-camps.) Edward Whittemore was such a writer! IMO, the Jerusalem Quartet (of which Sinai Tapestry is the first volume) is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Practically no-one has read it. Here's Jeff Vandermeer's recommendation.

An epic hashish dream … cosmic … fabulous … droll and moving. — The New York Times Book Review on Sinai Tapestry

And spies live perilously… They hunt for secrets… They always live under the unbearable psychological stress… They are always in fear… They have nowhere to run… Their private lives lie in ruins… Indeed you do, murmured the European thoughtfully. A case of excellent recall. Munk Szondi’s my name. From Budapest. You might have played a few games that seem to last forever but perhaps only last a few hours in the evening. The Bird Cage Theatre in Arizona claims that it is the home of the longest ever game of poker.The poker game started in 1881 and lasted an incredible 8 years, five months and three days.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. Edward Payson Whittemore (May 26, 1933 – August 3, 1995) was an American novelist, the author of five novels written between 1974 and 1987, including the highly praised series Jerusalem Quartet. He had started his career as a case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations (Asia, Middle East and Europe) between 1958 and 1967.