Revenge
REVIEW BY KAY SHIVELY
When Laura was a college student in 1986, her rabbi father, visiting Jerusalem, was shot by a young Palestinian. Although the bullet only grazed him, Laura was so angered by the attack that she vowed to find the "shooter" and get revenge.
The book opens in 1998 with Laura sitting in the home of the shooter, Omar Khatib, interviewing his family, who know her only as an American journalist researching the subject of revenge. Omar is in prison. In the intervening years she has become a journalist and has been assigned, at her request, to write a book on revenge. Her parents have divorced and remarried, and Laura is spending her own honeymoon year in Jerusalem.
Revenge actually has three story lines: research on the subject of revenge; her personal "vendetta" against the shooter; and her family's disintegration through divorce-the significance of which becomes increasingly more apparent.
Blumenfeld's research takes her to various societies where revenge is a way of life, including Sicily, Albania, and Iran. She also contemplates the differences between Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theologies of revenge, contrasting "an eye for an eye" with "turn the other cheek." She finds the Christian ideal of forgiveness particularly threatening.
She continues to visit the shooter's family throughout the year, becoming increasingly conflicted about her relationship to these people, who come to treat her as a beloved sister. She begins a correspondence with the shooter, thanks to his brother's smuggling their letters into and out of prison. Her dream of revenge begins to crumble as she comes to know the shooter up close, and she desires only for him to say he is sorry and to renounce violence as a means of resolving conflict.
In the courtroom in which the shooter is appealing for medical release, the truth tumbles out with astounding results, revealing the meaning of the book's subtitle. Laura Blumfeld's story is, above all, a story of hope. You must read it.