Conflict in the Bone

Celeste Fraser Delgado, Category 305

[Go to the original copy of this interview.]

Rare is the book that keeps me thinking long after I’ve finished the last page, especially when the book is not a ponderous philosophical tome but a vivid page turner. I was well aware of Jeffrey Goldberg’s narrative tricks in his memoir Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide from the first line which sucked me in with intimations of a kidnapping then dropped me just before the climax into a leisurely narrative of his childhood. Okay, fine, he can tell a story.

But what kept revolving around my head long after I’d worked out the plot (it’s a memoir, so, you know, he survives) was just how close to the surface his emotions are from start to finish. Which is not to say that he’s scared. Goldberg styles himself a tough guy (he shrugs off his captivity with a boast about having once talked his way past a hostile check point in the Congo), so we don’t see a lot of fear here. What’s on display, in fact, is an emotion much less acceptable in polite circles: his yearning for physical power, summed up in the worldview of his thirteen-year-old self as “Jews with guns.”

There are two ur moments in Goldberg’s text: his persecution by schoolyard bullies who humiliate him as a “Christ killer” and a trip to Israel in lieu of a bar mitzvah where he sees for the first time Jews who are not defenseless nebbishes but machine-gun wielding Israelis. Later on, his Zionism is overlaid by a stay at a lefty summer camp in the Catskills that promotes dreams of Arab and Jew living side by side and a long course of self-study on the eternal suffering of the tribe—but at the core of Goldberg’s quest is the desire never to be defenseless again.

Thus fortified, the author sets out to be the righteous warrior, only to find himself and his ideals standing guard at the largest Palestinian prison camp in Israel, in the midst of the first Intifada. So the rest of the memoir unfolds as a series of contradictions: Goldberg’s commitment to Zionism never wavers, but his understanding of the cost of that commitment constantly changes. What is remarkable is not only that Goldberg remembers so minutely the mercurial shifts in his positions, but that he records them so honestly. And that he desperately, almost absurdly, yearns to secure the friendship of the men he holds captive. Or at least one man, Rafiq, the Muslim of the title.

Often Rafiq is more a device than a character. A gifted mathematician and surreptitious leader of the uprising, he appears throughout the book, both a sign that Goldberg has not given up on his own ideals, and a perfect foil as Rafiq’s commitment to fundamentalist Islam waxes and wanes. Yet Goldberg’s view of the contingencies that produce changes in his friend is necessarily obscure and, even so, not sufficiently explored. There is a limit, apparently, to how much crossing the “Middle East divide” Goldberg’s character can take.

Yet in episode after episode, Goldberg hurls himself against History: now in the Israeli Army, later looking up friends in Gaza; here interviewing Arafat, there Sharon. What fascinates about Prisoners is not that he manages to heal himself or anyone else, but that he dares to expose that self as a network of tiny fractures always on the verge of breaking finally apart.

Listen to our conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg in the second installment of the c305 podcast series here.