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MARTYRS' CROSSING, Amy Wilentz's first novel, is distressingly
timely in its release. Arab-Israeli strife is back with a
vengeance. Israel is bombing Lebanon; Hamas and Hezbollah are
bombing Israel; the Israeli army is strafing Gaza; the Palestinian
police is strafing Israeli checkpoints. Israelis suffer,
Palestinians suffer, and Westerners shake their heads in
disbelief.

Internecine conflict never fails to confound, and those of us with
a vain, unhealthy compulsion to comprehend the apparently
incomprehensible more often than not find ourselves seeking answers
in the bottom of a glass. Such conflicts (alive and well in, among
other places, Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Chechnya, the
Balkans, the Great Lakes region of Africa, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka)
cannot be apprehended by reason alone. They are propelled by a
mishmash of half-knowledge, half-truth, calculation, chaos,
mythology, manipulation, human strength, human frailty, and
overriding, crushing emotion. They defy neat models and quick
fixes. To have a shot at comprehension we need the heavy artillery.
We need art.

Ms. Wilentz --- a Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker
from 1995 to 1997, and author of the prize-winning nonfiction work
THE RAINY SEASON --- has given us a heartfelt, at times
transcendent, novel. On a stormy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, a
tragedy forever changes the lives of a Palestinian woman and an
Israeli officer. In the subsequent events, the woman (daughter to
George Raad, a renowned Palestinian intellectual based in Boston,
and wife to Hassan Hajimi, a charismatic, imprisoned Hamas
strategist), the soldier (an upstanding, principled, sensitive
lieutenant with an element of the Everyman, as Israel still has
universal military conscription), and their loved ones find
themselves pawns in the great political game of
negotiations/threats/feints/strikes called the Peace Process, and
martyrs to the respective causes of two battling ephemera --- the
State of Israel and the Palestinian People.

Along the way, we meet a cast of colorful characters from both
sides of the conflict. They move through an evocative, motley,
dusty landscape of sputtering washing machines and backfiring
jalopies, dour government buildings and modest, comfortable (though
slightly ramshackle) private homes, all set against the backdrop of
relentless, glittering new construction, the harbinger of an
utterly new age. Ms. Wilentz truly shines as she strategically
deploys sensory details --- the image of rust on a bureaucrat's
desk, the sound of a struggling car, the smells of diesel and
cooking chicken --- to create a powerful sense of place.

The only quibbles I have with an otherwise excellent work concern
the Israeli characters and the narration of their side of the
story. The two main Israeli characters --- Ari Doron, the soldier,
and Daniel Yizhar, a crusty Israeli Army spin doctor --- did not
appear to me as fully developed as their Palestinian counterparts,
and not for lack of time devoted. We follow Doron through a
protracted, agonizing period of self-reproach and self-examination,
yet learn very little of his life and loves beyond the army and his
immediate family. Similarly, we see extensive tracts of Yizhar's
psyche --- by parts hardened and atrophied --- yet seem to be
continually trekking over familiar ground. The Israelis that most
intrigued me in the end were two secondary characters, Doron's
mother and Leila, a childhood acquaintance of George's who took
over the Raad ancestral home after the family fled to Jordan in
1947. Yizhar's thoughts and Doron's halting meanderings also slowed
down the novel, broke it up, and lowered the intensity level,
making it more challenging to feel the full weight of Doron's
tragic predicament.

But in the end these are minor criticisms for which the
transcendent moments in MARTYRS' CROSSING more than compensate.
Among others, these moments include the rain soaked, fateful riot
that opens the book, George Raad's visit to the Jerusalem home of
his childhood, and Doron's final visit with his mother. It is in
these sub-narratives that Wilentz really struts her stuff,
combining powerful, spare description, strong pacing, and taught,
restrained dialogue. I particularly admire her use of silence ---
the unspoken word and the unrealized act. Through these devices,
Wilentz brings her characters to life in all their human frailty,
giving us a visceral understanding of the conflict's human cost and
making it abundantly clear that tragedy does not discriminate ---
that oppressor and oppressed, victor and vanquished, are locked
together in a deadly spiral of violence and reproach that can only
be broken through a mutual acknowledgment of the other's humanity.
Wilentz, through the weaving of an informed, compassionate
narrative, has made it just the tiniest bit harder for enemies in
internecine conflict to engage in mutual dehumanization. In doing
so, she has made a lasting contribution and established herself as
a fiction writer to watch.