Jerusalem has long been the center of the world in Jewish life, but not since the time of King David has the city felt so personal and laid bare as it is in Sarah Tuttle-Singer’s new book “Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered.” Interwoven with the fighting, love, loss, and the longing of a mother, it speaks to all ages. But for young Jews the world over, the book has a particular resonance. As many of us struggle in our relationship with Israel in much the same way as our family relationships, “Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered” is the shining light that splits the fog.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer is the new media editor for the Times of Israel, one of Israel’s leading English news sites. She is a prolific blogger for Times of Israel and various publications like Kveller and Time. Having made aliyah only a few years ago, she is one of the public faces of Anglo immigrants in Israel. But that’s not really Sarah Tuttle-Singer.
Really, she’s a self-described mermaid, drifting between the different corners, streets, shops, and stories of the Old City. She is a daughter haunted by the ghost of her mother and a mother doing everything she can for her children to protect them from the crippling Israeli fear of terror, Arabs, Palestinians, and the “other.”
But most of all, she’s one of us. She isn’t an academic or a politician or a seasoned Israeli soldier. Sarah Tuttle-Singer is a girl from California who was sent to Israel by her Jewish mother, fell in love, moved, and learned about Israel’s complexities from the Palestinians and Israelis living there. Her book isn’t StandWithUs or CNN’s coverage of the Temple Mount. Tuttle-Singer isn’t in Israel to make news. She’s there to meet people, hear their stories, and live alongside them.
Have you ever had hummus with the Jordanian officials in charge of the Temple Mount during the 2015 Stabbing Intifada?
Neither have I. You wanna know who has?
“I think back on the Waqf officials I see eating hummus each morning,” Tuttle-Singer writes. “They’re grim and tense when they’re on the Temple Mount and working and I avoid them, but when I see them hanging out and dipping their pita into the warm paste, they’re the guys I sit with and say ‘good morning,’ to, and ‘what’s up?’ What is it about Jerusalem that does this to us?”
“What is it about Jerusalem that does this to us” is the question woven into every story, but Jerusalem, as in Jewish tradition, doesn’t just mean the physical stones of the Old City. Throughout the book, Jerusalem easily stands in for all sorts of forces in life outside of Tuttle-Singer’s control, like her mother’s death from cancer when she was in college. But also the forces that allow her to face her fears in the Old City and befriend incredible people. A life in which there is surviving sexual assault then experiencing the joys of motherhood, trauma then happiness – and between Israeli and Palestinian, fear then familiarity.
What is it about life that does this to us?
To read this book is to try and find the answer to this broader question in the interwoven stories of the Old City, and not all of these stories are easy or simple. Murdered Israeli fathers and beaten Palestinian kids. The protester chanting to kill the Jews, who later rescues a kitten from a pipe and joyously gives it to the old Jewish cat lady. Tuttle-Singer’s own sick and dying mother, and chasing her ghost thousands of miles away. This book is about duality – deeply loving a city, a country, a life while surviving horrible experiences within it.
In a way, young Diaspora Jews are also all about duality. We’re conflicted about our identities, politics, and choice of careers. We are fed up with the goyim and Bibi Netanyahu. And like all young adults since time immemorial, we sometimes fight with those we love – our families, our institutions, our friends – because life is this crazy, beautiful thing that hurts a lot sometimes and we’re not always sure what to do. Tuttle-Singer has been through that too. She doesn’t have the solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or to the horrible sides of life. But what her book overflows with is a surprisingly hopeful understanding of the times in which we live.
“The world is full of broken pieces, and the world is full of people who want to put them back together,” she writes. “There are scorpions and there are the righteous and I am a mermaid in between all of these things.” After the stories you’ll read, and the journey you’ll go on through “Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered,” you’ll never look at Jerusalem the same way again.
And who knows, maybe you too are a mermaid.
Lev Gringauz is a New Voices reporting fellow studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.
