To Jerusalem and Back

by Saul Bellow

In this "impassioned and thoughtful book" (The New York Times), Bellow records the opinions, passions, and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints -- Yitzhak Rabin, Amos Oz, the editor of the largest Arab-language newspaper in Israel, a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto -- and adds his own thoughts on being Jewish in the twentieth century.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Israel, Jewish, History, Memoir, Middle East

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.

People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.

Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.

Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.

People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.

People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.

Reviews

[Quo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly enough, I bought a copy of Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back at a centennial birthday celebration for the author where author Scott Turow was a keynote speaker. Having read 7 or 8 of Bellow's fictional works over many years & in the midst of planning a trip to Israel & the Palestinian Territories, this book seemed a nice travel accessory, even though written 4o years ago.



And while there are some interesting personal reflections on Israel and detailed encounters with a variety of Israelis, the book seemed much too self-indulgent, being at times more about Saul Bellow than about Israel or the cast of intriguing characters he intersects with while in Jerusalem.

Rather than presenting an overview of a famous American author's impressions, Bellow feels compelled to include a copious list of the books he has read and also inserts rather curious comments attributing power & social bearing based on the facial characteristics of many he encounters, a kind of rudimentary phrenology, rather than just concentrating on their ideas or life experiences, something that seemed more than a little distracting.

That said, Bellow is a sardonic story teller and his observations are often quite humorous, if also occasionally quizzical, one being his recounting of an encounter with an Orthodox Jew seated next to him on an El Al flight who refuses to be seated in the same row as Bellow's wife & who offers to pay the author a fixed monthly sum if he will forswear the consumption of pork. Bellow, with money in the bank & being current on his rent payments desists.

As the author meets up with some prominent Israelis, one gets the sense that Bellow doesn't want to be courted or admired for his Jewishness but for his status as a gifted writer and a famous touring American, something that is understandable but which at times seems to represent countering pulls & tugs on his innate sense of identity.



Bellow was a secular Jew, Montreal-born but Chicago-bred & educated, Chicago being the city where he spent most of his life & where he found many of his fictional voices, Augie March and Herzog among them. He did not seem ecstatic about the prospect of a cultural rebirth in Israel but rather appeared to prefer admiring Jerusalem and Israel, while keeping it at something of a distance.

And, Bellow especially bristles when an ultra Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded & wearing a skullcap, informs him that American Jews are not Jews at all, also making reference to "recently liberated territories" that were originally allotted to Palestinians, suggesting that "all biblical lands must be colonized & reclaimed by the Jews."

While Bellow's travel observations and commentary go back 40 years, much of the underlying tension in Jerusalem & elsewhere in the region remains amazingly unchanged. For example, the author spends time with a Prof. Jacob Leib Talmon who laments what he calls the new forms of Israeli nationalism, a fanatical nationalist extremism:

It is a lunacy to carry the argument back to the Judaism of the Bronze Age and to invoke the enmity of the Amalekites and the Edomites, to claim eternal rights--past, present & future--in the Holy Land and to combine eschatological visions with modern arms. Elsewhere, such movements have invariably been intensely anti-Semitic.

Mystical nationalists in Israel are using the language of a holy war just as Arab extremists also call for a holy war, a jihad. Jewish survival is not only threatened by Arab enemies but is being undermined from within.

Especially interesting were Saul Bellow's meetings with Prime Minister Rabin and his wife + novelist & former kibbutznik, Amos Oz, who comments that "Israel has more different visions of Heaven than any outsider can imagine, with everyone who came over having brought his own dream of Paradise with him."

Bellow listens as Oz details how those within the kibbutz, many being Russian in origin, read Dostoevsky & other serious books, listen to classical music by Russian composers and spend their evenings gravely discussing Marxism, while German Jews read Homer, Plato, Goethe & listen to Mozart. There are also memorable anecdotes about time spent with Moshe, a Masseur and the longtime barber at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.



40 years after Bellow's travel book, To Jerusalem & Back first appeared, the world is still debating & attempting to resolve the possibility of a Two State Solution and the continuing occupation of Palestinian Territories and Jerusalem remains a tense but fascinating destination. I will include a last quote from Prof. Talmon, "What Switzerland is to winter holidays & the Dalmatian Coast is to summer tourists, Israel & the Palestinians are to the West's need for justice--a sort of moral resort area." What a wonderful manner of summing up!

I began by awarding this book 3 stars but in honor of the Bellow Centennial & after reviewing my notes, I now find that I gained more than initially remembered by reading To Jerusalem & Back & I now intend to downgrade a few of my complaints, giving Saul's old travel book another *.

[Carla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uauh.... what a writer... Just a small mouthpiece: "Should communism sweep Italy, would the Pope move to Jerusalem? Rather, says one of the prelates, he would stay in Rome and become Party Secretary. And there we are, Kissinger has entirely wrecked Russia's Middle East policy and the Pope is about to swap the Vatican for Kremlim. Dessert is served."

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this over the weekend in, appropriately, Jerusalem. Bellow would seem to have some advantage over the minions who have put together their thoughts on ancient ruins, futility of religious hatred, the mystery of the Orient, etc. - after all, he speaks Yiddish (though apparently not much Hebrew), has covered the Six-Day War (for Newsday), has some local friends and family, and receives the red carpet from legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, meeting Amos Oz, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin, etc. (He also meets Kissinger after returning home - while claiming not to know any politicians well, he does like reminding us who he's met, and which White House parties he's attended.)

But ultimately I found this book disappointingly formulaic, covering the usual themes, arguing back and forth between the positions of the French Left, the Soviets, the State Department, being struck by the same things that strike everyone about Jerusalem. Bellow has read a decent amount of books and papers on the subject, which he feeds the reader at intervals, but while he is quick to make fun of others for clichéd and shallow ideas, he is unable to come up with any of his own that don't fall into those same criteria. Not that he should be judged too harshly for that; only that some humility would have made it easier to forgive. But then he wouldn't be Bellow.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well known , Nobel prize winning author , put his pen to the service of recording his 1975 visit to the Land of Israel and his thoughts on the dillemas faced by Israel at the time , and on world politics at large in the mid 1970's.

The author puts down his observations , from his thoughts about Hassidim on a plane from Heathrow to Ben Gurion airport to a secular kibbutz near Ceasarea, and his meetings with leaders and thinkers in Israel such as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban , Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck , poet and journalist Chaim Gouri and professor Yehoshafat Harkabi as well as Arab figures like Mahmoud Abu Zuluf , editor of the al Kuds , at the time the largest Arab language newspaper in Jerusalem , who'se life , and the life of his children , the author reports where threatened for his relatively 'moderate and conciliatory' line.

Although Abu Zuluf later became a stooge of Arafat and the PLO.

Bellow observes the Israeli people as lacking in rancour or bitterness against the Arabs , despite being constantly under the threat of anihilation and targeted by terrorism.

The threat of anihilation , of a second holocaust , looms permanently in the Israeli mind , leading one of Bellow's aquaintances to observe that it would be a horrible irony if the Jews being gathered in one place enabled a second holocaust to become a reality.

since before the State of Israel was established the Jews of Israel have had to live with terror , an example in this book being a homicide attack ""on the Jaffa Road, because of another bomb, six adolescents-two on a break from school-stopping at a coffee shop to eat buns, have just died."

It is because of his relatively sympathetic portrait of the Israeli people in this volume , that Bellow came under attack from anti-Israel high priest of the ultra-left , Noam Chomsky.

Bellow muses on the attempts made by Jean Paul Sartre to balance his understanding of Israel, with his sympathy of the Arabs and his anti-American stance.

This book was written in the embryonic stages of anti-Israel hatemongering from leftwing academics in the West , alhtough it must be noted that all their propaganda was created in the old Soviet Union , where the 'Zionism is racism' canard was created .

In a heartfelt plea the author writes: 'I sometimes wonder why it is impossible for Western intellectuals...to say to the Arabs " We have to demmand also more from you. You too-the Marxists among you in particular- must try to do something for brotherhood and make peace with the Jews , for they have suffered monstrously in Christian Europe and under Islam. Israel occupies under one sixth of one percent of the lands you call Arab. Isn't it possible to adjust the traditions of Islam , to reinterpret , to change , to change emphasis , so as to accept the trifling occupancy? A great civilization should be capable of humane and generous flexibility. The destruction of Israel will do you no good, let the Jews live in their small state".

In reporting on a converstaion with Professor Jacob Leib Talmon , Bellow reports Talmon's warnings that 'the fate of Jewry in Israel and the Diaspora , is so closely linked he says , that the destruction of Israel would bring with it 'the destruction of corporate Jewish existance all over the world , and a catastrophy that might overtake US Jewry"

Alas , in the 30 years since this was written , leftwing academics (and the media) around the world have been the main force in hardening Arab attitudes , by taking up anti-Israel hatred to Nazi-like levels.

While the author has an overall understanding attitude of the Israeli people , he is rather less so of the Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, not quite seeming to understand the depth of the Jewish right to and connection with this part of the Land of Israel.

[Luís Paz da Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Há algum tempo que andava com curiosidade de ler algo do Saul Bellow. Não comecei, seguramente, pela obra mais indicada, mas fui levado pela minha recente "descoberta" do gosto por literatura de viagens e pelo bom critério que o Carlos Vaz Marques tem utilizado na selecção das obras desta colecção (da qual li o excelente "New York" do impagável Brendan Behan e, mais recentemente, "Um Gentleman Na Ásia" do Somerset Maugham)editada pela Tinta da China.
Esta obra que é, salvo o êrro de 1976, é uma obra de, salvo o êrro, 1976. O Sr. Bellow, um judeu norte-americano de Chicago, vai visitar Israel e discorre longamente, como eminente erudito que é, sobre todas as questões políticas e sociológicas do conflito israelo-árabe e, mais especificamente, israelo-palestiniano, numa altura em que, depois da guerra de 1973 (dita do Yom Kipur, pelo facto de os árabes terem aproveitado a data para um ataque surpresa), Israel começa a perder as graças da opinião pública. Bellow não é arrogante nem intransigente, mas também não é "politicamente correcto". Procura aprender com quem sabe e fundamentar as suas opiniões. Gostei particularmente da parte em que ele analisa e se interroga de qual o motivo para que , no concerto das nações, se exija mais da postura moral de Israel por força do que sofreram anteriormente às mãos de quem martirizou e perseguiu o povo judeu. Como Bellow, também não percebo. É como se aos agressores tudo se perdoe porque não prestam e aos agredidos tudo se contabilize porque se lhes exige que tenham o carácter temperado na forja das provações. Não é simples, mas não é seguramente assim.
O meu problema com esta obra é apenas este: não era a isto que eu vinha. Não há nada de errado com gelado de morango, a não ser que se tivesse a expectativa de que fosse de framboesa...
Não é um mau livro, muito pelo contrário, mas não é um livro de viagens. A viagem é, aqui, um pretexto para levantar outras questões e debater outros temas. Todos nobres e válidos mas, lá está: não era isso que eu queria ler. Mas gostei da fluidez da prosa e da honestidade sem pretensiosismo do Autor.
"Investe-se uma grande quantidade de inteligência na ignorância quando se sente uma profunda
necessidade de ilusão" (pág. 205).
Frases deste calibre dão-me a certeza de que voltarei a ler mais coisas escritas por Saul Bellow.

[Harry · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book of assorted ramblings of Bellow's extended visit to Istael in 1976. Bellow has no connection to Israel or its politics other than being an assimilated Jew. But as a Nobel Laureate, he has many literary and political friends and aquaintances in high places who offer him their often conflicting views. Many of them are Western intellectuals, leftists and socialists. It is amazing in the hindsight of after more than 40 years after this book was written how wrong these views and opinions were. After many frustrating attempts at peace, Israel's left, particularly the Labor Party, has been discredited and is in disarray. Although Bellow tries to be balanced, one cannot get over the hand-wringing and Jewish guilt that pervades his outlook over Israel's survivial and the "occupation."
Only when we come to the "Back" of "To Jerusalem and Back" do we find a more sober and balanced approach.
The most amusing part of the book is at the very beginning when Bellow is seated next to a Chasid on his flight to Israel who offers him $15 a week to keep kosher. Bellow politely refuses.

[AHadavand · Rating 1 out of 5]

Racist and opinionated.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A political travel book that is somehow both incredibly outdated and currently modern and relevant at the same time. (Which is super depressing actually. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?)

And while I liked Saul Bellow's writing here (I'm not familiar with his other work), and his take on politics (he has a way with descriptions), I was surprised that this skinny little book with cramped typeface won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature. I enjoyed it a lot, and flagged and highlighted dozens of lines and paragraphs "for later", but, I dunno. This is just a small travel/political non-fiction about Israel. I guess I don't know much (if at all) about Nobel-Prize winning Literature, I just was surprised to learn that this tiny non-fiction could contend (and win!)...

Anyway, the book opens with a fantastic description of Jerusalem. It describes Bellow's Jerusalem of 1975, and also the Jerusalem I knew in 2006, after the Second Intifada:

The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival -the survival of the decent society created in Israel with a few decades. At first this is hard to grasp because the setting is so civilized. You are in a city like many another -well, not quite, for Jerusalem is the only ancient city I've ever seen whose antiquities are not on display as relics but are in daily use. Still, the city is a modern city with modern utilities. You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink. Uneasy, you go out to your civilized dinner. Bombs are exploding everywhere. Dynamite has just been thrown in London; the difference is that when a bomb goes off in a West End restaurant the fundamental right of England to exist is not in dispute. (pg. 25)

I'd like to link that paragraph above to a few lines on the next page:

(To say, as George Steiner says, that Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model can't be right.) The Jews did not become nationalistic because they drew strength from their worship of anything resembling Germanic Blut und Eisen but because they alone, amongst the peoples of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth. This right is still clearly not granted them, not even in the liberal West. (pg. 26)

How the times have not changed. From 1975 to 2020.

And where some bits/politics Bellow's describes are exactly the same today, there are a lot of namedropped political figures of yesteryear and issues that have become totally irrelevant with time. These outdated bits are such a trip.
Bellow writes somewhere in the beginning of the book that even life for an irreligious Jew in Israel is semi-religious. Which was maybe true in 1975, but is certainly not true now.
The Yom Kippur War, aptly named, was waged against Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the holiest day on the Jewish Calendar. The only reason the Israeli troops were able to mobilize so quickly against the surprise attack was that everyone in the country/all the soldiers were in synagogues aross the country (traditional/irreligious Jews and religious Jews alike). Today, the average Tel Avivian doesn't know what Kosher means in terms of dietary restrictions for religious Jews. It's a different Israel.

Another bit is Bellow's pontificating about the "future" Russian immigration to Israel and how Israeli culture etc. will change. The Russian Aliyah happened in the late '80s and '90s and is mostly all secular, and not very Jewish to my understanding.

Otherwise, Bellow had a fantastic eye for the political future, and called it clear as day:
(Regarding Left-wing anti-Semitism)

But there is a full reservoir of left-wing sympathies that Egypt, Syria, and the PLO can and do tap. Many American radicals share these sympathies.
I briefly try to persuade Rabin that Israel had better give some thought to the media intelligentsia in the United States... If the media were to lay the problem of the Palestinians or peace in the Middle East before the American public opinion...it might be disastrous for Israel. Rabin says he understands the danger. I judge by what I have seen and heard at home. At home the basic facts are not widely known. Very few Americans seem to know, for instance, that when the U.N., in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the U.N. plan, vowing to resist partition by force and assaulting the Jewish community in Palestine. The Arabs have succeeded in persuading the American public opinion that the Jews descended upon Palestine after World War II and evicted the native population with arms. (pg. 115)

Was true in 1975 and is sadly true today.

Yes, parts of the book could be a little slow. But parts were poetically descriptive, and true to the Israel I know.
Here's another good quote from Bellow:

I sometimes think there are two Israels. The real one is territorially insignificant. The other, the mental Israel, is immense, a country inestimably important, playing a major role in the world, as broad as all history -and perhaps as deep as sleep." (pg. 131)

Israel takes up only 1/6 of 1% of what we would call "Arab lands"/i.e. the Middle East. Really just minuscule. The most insignificant territory I can point to on a map (And only because I know it's already there! It's too small to identify on most world maps!), yet brought up on every current American Political Debate stage. Watch the current Democratic debates & wait for "Israel" or "Palestine" to be mentioned. You won't have to wait long.

In this disorderly century refugees have fled from many countries. In India, in Africa, in Europe, millions of human beings have been put flight, transported, enslaved, stamped over the borders, left to starve, but only the case of the Palestinians is held permanently open. Where Israel is concerned, the world swells with moral consciousness. Moral judgment, a wraith in Europe, becomes a full-blooded giant when Israel and the Palestinians are mentioned. Is this because Israel has assumed the responsibilities of a liberal democracy? Is it for other reasons? (pg. 135)

Bellow brings in a lot of understanding of Arab culture as well in relation to Israel that I didn't know/understand before reading.

The Arab states, whether feudal or leftist, recognize only the religion of Islam. They tolerate Jews, Maronites, Copts, but as minorities under Islamic supremacy. The Fatah terrorists have appealed to Islamic religious leaders to declare their war against the Jews a jihad: a holy war must be fought to establish a secular republic. (pg. 152)

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are distributed in Arab countries in large new printings paid for in petro-dollars. In the thirties, the Nazis won considerable support in the Middle East, and earlier, French anti-Dreyfusards had spread anti-Semitism in Syria and Lebanon, where French culture was esteemed. (pg. 144)

The root of the problem is simply this-that the Arabs will not agree to the existence of Israel. Walter Laqueur writes that the issue is neither borders nor the formation of a Palestinian state. The core of the problem is, as Elie Kedourie puts it, the right of the Jews, "hitherto a subject community under Islam, to exercise political sovereignty in an area regarded as part of the Muslim domain." And Laqueur, citing Kedourie, asks, "Why...should the Arabs, who have been unwilling for twenty-eight years to grant this right to the Jews, suddenly be willing to do so just when Arab power and influence have so greatly increased?" Nationalist movements do not renounce national territory.
A binational state would not last long, says Laqueur. In a "secular democratic Palestine," a civil war would be inevitable. (pg. 179-180)

Well, there goes our argument for peace & a Two-State Solution.
Yikes.
So here we are, stuck with the same politics & policies of the past. Almost 50 years and both a lot and little has changed.

Yet...

Life in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is clear purpose in it. People are fighting for the society they have created, and for life and honor.

4 stars for a good little book on politics. It made me think a lot about Israel as it is currently, and all its mistakes made from 1967 on.

2 stars for a really bad travel book.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

About 1/4 of the way through, this one goes DNF. Virtually nothing about interactions with ordinary Israelis, instead political rants referencing dated politicians such as Kissinger.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idiosyncratic, impressionistic, informed, and entertaining account of Bellow's extended 1975 trip to Israel. It's shocking and disheartening to what extent the troublesome Arab-Israeli dynamics remain the same today; seemingly, 35 years have passed with only extra deaths to show for them. (OK, the Soviet Union fell. That was good.) One Israeli spoke to Bellow about the importance of American oil independence to successfully resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--gee, we sure made a lot of progress on that one. As far as I can tell, Bellow tells it straight--and, of course, he tells it well.

[Miguel Alves]

I picked it up hoping for a not-too-stressful, not-too-tense travelogue, but I should have expected that a non-fiction work set in a region fraught with political issues, one set in the close aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, and which I’m reading in the particularly charged climate of 2025, would be a source of high friction and some teeth grinding. Truth is, it’s an absolutely hot, boiling work, abrasive and limestone-rugged—in a twisted way, appropriate for the Jerusalem that Bellow paints for us, all made of the same coarse rock, and where the air itself churns with friction. A city where you go about, shop at the local market, eat your breakfast of eggs and toasted bread, while, at all times, a great tension, political and existential, presses down on your head.

Bellow writes with elegance, and he does marvels with descriptions, but he throws off a lot of smarmy “writerisms” and cheap “witty” aphorisms that don’t land too well. In his politics, aesthetics and posture, he represents a sort of old guard of intellectuals. He’s an upscale individual, and all of his Israeli and American friends have an “upper crust” feel to them. It’s not hard to see why he’s a bit out of fashion today. I also found myself butting heads with his perspectives and stances on many occasions. We live in different times, and the climate has changed since the 1970s, which should contribute to divergent views. But despite his intention to be lucid, humanistic, and not propagandist or moralizing (which I would say he achieves), he still comes off as unfair or biased quite often. If nothing else, at least this element of quarrel with the writer might contribute to the heat and turbulence that you expect a novel with the word “Jerusalem” in the title to deliver.

[Krystelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a travel guide that did not rely so much on evocation and the world that the writer observes so much as it read like a diary. It was more reliant on personal discussions and a political state so outdated that it now reads more like a faerie story than history based on the current set of circumstances in the Israel/Palestine debate. I don't know, indeed, if there is a place for assimilated Jews to speak so much on the debate- it's personally my least favourite thing that people ask me just because I'm Jewish, and I have to tell them I simply do not know enough to give a fair position on the matter. It feels like Bellow is in the same place but nevertheless decided to make it his business.

There was no rumination on the architecture, the minutiae of everyday life, there was even little comment on the food and the actual politics of the country. It instead focused squarely on the American debate, and so my interest drained rapidly. Rather a disappointment in its way- I would have liked something evocative and timely, but I more or less ended up knowing more about Kissinger than I will ever need to know.

[Lisa Tangen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. And really not much has changed about Israel, Palestine etc.

[Paulo Bugalho · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What is the meaning of such corpse-making? In ancient times the walls of captures cities in the Middle East were sometimes hung with the skins of the vanquished. That costum has died out. But the eagerness to kill for political ends - or to justify killing by such ends - is as keen now as it ever was."

[Northpapers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bellow's account of his time in Jerusalem and the evolution of his thinking about the conflict there functions on several levels.

The narrative is threaded with a critical survey of thinking and writing on the conflict between Israel and its neighbors. As he interacts with the life of the state, Bellow summarizes, converses with or comments on Chomsky, Sartre, Kissinger, and an impressive array of scholars. He does assert his opinion, but he seems to do so with integrity, granting points to those whose thinking runs counter to his own, and examining the context carefully for lines of thought.

Bellow also does a wonderful job of depicting life in a city marked by violence. The way the threat of annihilation affects the daily life of the neighborhoods and homes Bellow visits is nuanced, devastating, and sometimes quite funny.

The most compelling aspect for me was his depiction of an intellectual trying to think and listen well in highly politicized times. Can one think clearly about larger themes in the face of Annihilation? Should one even try? What kind of fellowship and discipline can keep thoughts rich and nuanced when people are dying?

The integration of all these approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict seems to frustrate many readers, but I found it far more satisfying that straight arguments. When Bellow finally offers his own conclusion, he seems to do so out of a sense of obligation. But the story itself he tells with the craftsmanship of a masterful thinker and novelist.

[Nandan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a huge disappointment. I picked up this book in an old-fashioned Santa Fe bookstore just reading Saul Bellow's name as an author and of course, the title suggesting its subject. In stead of a thorough, impartial yet personal view of the middle-eastern problem coming from a Nobel Prize winning author who also happens to be Jewish, the book is oddly incoherent jumble of incidents and perspectives. There are couple of beautiful paragraphs - one talking about sense of History and other describing the ethereal beauty of Jerusalem evening - but not much beyond that. I wish I'd read Chomsky's stinging rebuke of this book before buying it impulsively.

[Joana Marinho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written in 1976 while Bellow was visiting Jerusalem and interviewed and talked to intellectuals, politicians, jews, arabs and people he met there. However it is more than ever relevant and very interesting to understand what's in stake when talking on the israel-palestinian conflict, its challenges and solutions.

[Adele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very little has changed in Mid-East relationships during the 35 years since this book's been written, which is what made it interesting.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bellow captures a debate still framed by nationalism and holocaust. Do multiculturalism and anti-racism alter that debate?

[Paulo Rodrigues · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O que se sabe, é que um dos factos da vida dos judeus não foi alterado
pela criação de um Estado judaico: não se pode tomar por certo o direito à vida. Os outros podem; os judeus, não.
Não significa que as outras pessoas tenham uma vida boa
e agradável sob um regime satisfatório. Não, só quer dizer
que para os judeus, por serem judeus, o direito à vida nunca foi um direito natural."

Esta obra do prémio nobel da literatura Saul Bellow é uma entrada profunda e poética na cidade milenar Jerusalém.

Mais do que um simples relato de viagem,este livro é uma enorme reflexão sobre a história, a cultura e a complexidade da cidade sagrada.
Com uma prosa rica e envolvente, Bellow guia-nos e apresenta-nos ao cotidiano de Jerusalém, capturando a energia vibrante e a atmosfera espiritual que estão entranhadas na cidade. Através dele vamos experimentar a diversidade cultural, os conflitos históricos e a busca pela identidade que moldam a alma de Jerusalém.
Livre de preconceitos e repleto de curiosidades, abordando temas complexos como religião, política, identidade, oferecendo uma visão abrangente da cidade.

"Jerusalém, Ida e Volta" é uma Bíblia histórica essencial para quem quiser entender a história e a cultura de uma das cidades mais importantes do mundo.

"São pouquíssimos os americanos que parecem saber, por exemplo. que quando a ONU propôs, em, 1947, a criaçao de dois Estados distintos, um judaico e outro árabe, os judeus aceitaram a cláusula da independência politica dos árabes palestinianos. Foram as nações árabes
que rejeitaram o plano da ONU, jurando resistir à divisão por meio da força e atacando a comunidade judaica da Pa-
lestina. Os árabes conseguiram convencer a opinião pública americana de que os judeus invadiram a Palestina depois da
Segunda Guerra Mundial e expulsaram a população nativa com recurso a armas."

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting account (particularly in the posterity of modernity) of Bellow's experiences in Jerusalem, punctuated with his own and others' views of the interposed Judaist and Arabic relations following the Second World War.

Like many of his other books, it feels at times like ADHD gone mad. Additionally, some of his views and comments have aged poorly in light of temporal progress, yet the aggregate picture of the book remains as that which depicts a race, who, in Bellow's own words, faced "extinction" and thus needed to rally around something.

Like many of his books, key philosophical themes of death and love make themselves apparent in both the subtext and supertext.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s something immediately disarming about Saul Bellow when he steps out of his novelist’s shell and speaks as a man among men—still observant, still quick-witted, still looking for metaphysical punchlines, but more vulnerable. *To Jerusalem and Back* is not just a travelogue; it is a confrontation with history, theology, politics, and his own Jewishness, a walk through a city that is both eternal and explosively mortal.

Reading it feels like sharing a cab with Bellow through the crowded, chaotic streets of Jerusalem in the mid-1970s, as he alternates between lyrical reflection and cranky bewilderment. You can almost hear him muttering, “What have we done to this ancient city?” and then, seconds later, philosophizing about the unkillable human spirit over a cup of bitter coffee.

When Bellow wrote this book, the Yom Kippur War was still echoing through Israel’s consciousness. The nation was anxious, half-defiant, half-terrified, and Bellow arrived as an outsider—yet not quite. He was Jewish, yes, but an American Jew, raised among the secular certainties and comedic neuroses of Chicago, not the pious dust of Jerusalem.

That dual identity—sympathetic yet skeptical, insider yet outsider—makes the whole book crackle. He’s not there to preach Zionism or to reject it; he’s there to think, to look, to wrestle with the contradictions that modern Israel embodies. The result is a rare kind of honesty, the sort that only comes from a man who is comfortable with discomfort.

The book does not read like a straight narrative. It is episodic, elliptical, meandering in that quintessential Bellow way. He will be talking to an Israeli intellectual about national security one minute, and then suddenly he’s meditating on Kafka’s correspondence or the Book of Job. This can be maddening if you want a tidy “travel book,” but that’s not what Bellow does. He’s allergic to neatness. He likes edges—cracks where irony and revelation leak through. Jerusalem, for him, is the ultimate cracked mirror: sacred and profane, tragic and comic, united by nothing but its own persistence.

One of the most striking things in *To Jerusalem and Back* is how Bellow refuses to romanticize Israel. He loves the people he meets—their intensity, their intelligence, their survivalist humour—but he doesn’t let them off the hook. He’s sharply aware of the moral and existential toll of building a nation under siege. He talks to soldiers, professors, rabbis, bureaucrats, and refugees, and with each encounter, he’s probing not just for political truth but for something more elusive: how do you live meaningfully in a world built on catastrophe and resurrection? There’s a moment where he compares the modern Israeli predicament to a form of “metaphysical fatigue”—the exhaustion of having to justify your right to exist, day after day, in a place where even the stones argue back. It’s pure Bellow—philosophical, poetic, a little sardonic.

And yet, there’s tenderness here. Beneath the intellectual play, the sarcasm, the self-mockery, Bellow’s empathy is genuine. He’s not a propagandist; he’s a witness. He wants to understand how a people traumatized by history can still find humor and energy to argue about bus fares or Talmudic footnotes. He admires the Israelis’ vitality, their bluntness, their refusal to drown in despair. But he’s also aware of what this constant vigilance costs them—the psychological tightening, the moral hardening, the sense that one must always be right or be annihilated. In his hands, Jerusalem becomes less a city than a metaphor for the human condition: a place where too much meaning has accumulated and where every meaning is contested.

Bellow’s prose here is astonishingly supple. He can shift from street-level description to cosmic speculation in the space of a paragraph. One moment he’s describing a cafe filled with cigarette smoke and chatter, and the next he’s meditating on the problem of evil or quoting Spinoza. It shouldn’t work—but it does, because he writes with the cadence of thought itself, that messy, looping rhythm of an intelligent mind trying to make sense of chaos. Reading him, you feel the tug of mental energy, the constant oscillation between irony and awe. The sentences are alive with moral tension; you can sense his skepticism wrestling with his yearning for faith. Moreover, isn’t that what great literature does? It dramatizes consciousness at war with itself.

Some of the best passages are those where he admits to confusion. Bellow’s humility, when it appears, is deeply moving. He doesn’t pretend to “understand” the Middle East; he’s smart enough to know that no outsider truly can. Instead, he observes, listens, and reflects. He notes how even ordinary conversation in Jerusalem carries a theological charge, how people talk about God, justice, or destiny as if they were discussing the weather. For a man used to American secularism, this constant moral gravity is both intoxicating and oppressive. You can feel him craving the clarity of Chicago, yet knowing that something profound lives here, something he’s been missing. He calls it, half-mockingly, the “burden of history”—but you sense he’s seduced by it too.

What gives *To Jerusalem and Back* its enduring power is precisely that ambivalence. Bellow doesn’t give easy answers. He doesn’t say, “This is good” or “That is evil.” Instead, he gives us the texture of lived reality—its contradictions, its beauty, its absurdities. The conversations he records are full of digressions and paradoxes. One Israeli tells him that peace is impossible; another insists it’s inevitable. A poet laments the loss of spiritual depth; a soldier defends pragmatism. Bellow absorbs it all, not as a journalist collecting sound bites, but as a novelist listening for the music of human thought. His Israel is a chorus of voices, all clamouring for meaning.

And then there’s the question of faith. Bellow, that inveterate humanist, approaches God with both reverence and irony. He doesn’t believe in divine intervention, but he believes in the divine spark—in the capacity of people to rise above degradation. In Jerusalem, he feels the weight of millennia pressing down on that spark. The city forces him to acknowledge that human beings will always reach for transcendence, even in the rubble of politics. There’s a line where he says something like, “History has a way of demanding belief even from the unbeliever.” That could be the book’s thesis. Bellow can’t bring himself to pray, but he can’t ignore the sacred either. He’s too honest to be pious, too curious to be cynical.

His humor, too, is essential. Without it, the book might collapse under its own seriousness. Bellow’s comic sensibility keeps him sane. He notices absurdities everywhere: the bureaucracy of holiness, the contradictions of nationalism, the surreal coexistence of war and normalcy. At one point, he describes the sound of children playing near a military checkpoint—it’s a moment of devastating irony, yet he finds beauty in it. He sees that laughter, however fragile, is a form of resistance. The whole book is like that: tragicomic, humane, irreverent in the face of despair.

Of course, not everyone loves *To Jerusalem and Back.* Some critics find it too self-absorbed, too digressive, too much about Bellow’s mind and not enough about the city. However, that is the point. The Jerusalem he gives us is filtered through consciousness. It’s a mirror held up to the self as much as to society. The book’s structure—part diary, part essay, part meditation—mirrors the instability of the place itself. There’s no tidy resolution because Jerusalem offers none. And yet, through this very refusal to resolve, Bellow achieves something profound: he captures what it feels like to live inside history rather than above it.

I remember the first time I read it, feeling like I was watching a mind at work in real time—a rare thing in literature. There’s a tactile immediacy to his thought process, as if he’s scribbling notes on the back of a map while the city unfolds around him. You can smell the dust, feel the heat, hear the arguments. And every so often, he steps back and drops a sentence that could be etched in stone: “Jerusalem is a place where reality and myth have a street address.” That one still gives me chills.

Bellow’s genius lies in how he uses the personal to illuminate the universal. His observations about Israel become reflections on identity, belonging, and the absurdity of modern life. He’s asking: How do we stay moral in a world built on conflict? How do we preserve tenderness without losing clarity? These questions are as relevant now as they were in 1976. In an age of polarized politics and social media outrage, his call for nuance feels radical. He’s not interested in taking sides; he’s interested in staying awake.

And that’s perhaps the most subversive thing about *To Jerusalem and Back*: it’s a book about attention. About looking deeply, thinking slowly, refusing the comfort of slogans. Bellow wants us to resist the temptation of moral laziness. His prose demands engagement—it’s dense, allusive, full of interruptions. You can’t skim it; you have to wrestle with it. But in that wrestling, you find a kind of freedom. Like Jacob at the Jabbok, Bellow wrestles with his angel—the angel of history, of guilt, of absurdity—and refuses to let go until it blesses him. The blessing is the book itself.

There’s also a subtle melancholy beneath the humour. Bellow senses that something in the modern Jewish experience is both miraculous and tragic. The creation of Israel, for all its triumph, comes with an undercurrent of unease—an awareness that safety and peace are never final. He writes not as a nationalist but as a moralist, one who understands that survival is not enough; one must also preserve decency, imagination, and compassion. That tension—between survival and soul—runs through the book like an electric current.

By the end, Bellow doesn’t “solve” Jerusalem. He’s too wise for that. What he does instead is something braver: he humanizes it. He makes it a city of individuals, each carrying their own contradictions. The soldier who quotes poetry. The scholar who dreams of peace but fears naiveté. The cab driver who curses traffic and then blesses God in the same breath. Through these fragments, Bellow gives us a portrait not of a holy city, but of humanity itself—bewildered, stubborn, and luminous.

Reading *To Jerusalem and Back* today feels like time travel. The geopolitics may have shifted, but the moral questions remain the same. We still live in a world where history bleeds into the present, where belief and skepticism collide. Bellow’s voice—by turns exasperated, compassionate, amused—reminds us that literature’s job isn’t to fix reality but to see it clearly. And clarity, in a world addicted to noise, is a form of grace.

If I had to sum up the experience of reading this book, I’d say it feels like standing on the Mount of Olives at dusk: the light golden, the air trembling, the city below humming with centuries of longing. You’re filled with awe and confusion in equal measure. You don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or start writing. That’s the Bellow effect. He makes you feel the pulse of existence—restless, contradictory, alive.

So yes, *To Jerusalem and Back* may be a “travel book,” but it’s really an existential pilgrimage. Bellow goes to Jerusalem not to find answers but to test his questions against the hardest material on earth: history itself. And in doing so, he reminds us why we read him—not for comfort, but for company. Because in a world perpetually on the brink, we need voices that can look at chaos and still find meaning, however fragile.

Bellow doesn’t give us peace. He gives us consciousness—and that’s the harder, braver gift.

Give it a go…..

[Connor Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full acknowledgement that,
1. This book is very much dated (1976 publication)
2. I can’t confess to know much of what has happened between Israel and Palestine in the years since 1976 which have led to the ongoing 2023 conflict.

The below are quotes I thought worth making record of:

P66-67
[Tzvi] Lamm admits the importance of […] the Holy Land […] in inspiring the Jews to auto-emancipation. But with success the emphasis shifted; the need to save the Jews was translated into something else - the project of "redeeming the land." The early Zionist leaders were trying to redeem the people. Realistic Zionist leadership was willing to accept partition "in order to absorb and save Jews rather than to remain faithful to slogans that it itself had coined." Rescue is the true aim of Zionism - not the "liberation" of the Promised Land but the rescue of the Jews, repeatedly threatened with annihilation. But Lamm believes that Ben-Gurion had a messianic character. "Ethnocentrism," or a national "narcissism," appeared in Israel. By 1956 it had become aggressively opportunistic. […] It relied upon military force and followed the politics of "hiring out our sword" instead of seeking a peace settlement with Egypt. It ceased to think of itself as the sanctuary for rescued people but began to think of a State, with an Army.


P114
Toward the end of the meal, the talk turns to an important and neglected subject: public opinion. [It is admitted] that Israel has not been effective in its publicity. I say that Arab propaganda has become extremely effective and that the Arabs have succeeded in winning worldwide public support. Yes, they have a talent for that sort of thing[; it is implied] that this is not one of Israel's major problems. I disagree.
The Arabs enjoy a significant advantage in the sympathy of the left.

According to Bellow, there is a common held belief amongst members of the left that, “Israel, living on American subsidies, is serving America's imperialist aims in the Middle East,” and that, “there is in Europe a full reservoir of left-wing sympathies that Egypt, Syria, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation can and do tap.”

Unbelievably, and perhaps I am interpreting the use of the phrase ‘clean-up’ not as intended, but Bellow writes (in 1975 in conjunction with the conclusion of the Vietnam War) of how Israel should look to capitalise on the United States’ “lets-clean-it-up mood,” where amongst other things, Bellow claims the US had “cleaned up Vietnam.” That’s incredibly bold to make such an assertion. What exactly did the US ‘clean-up’ in Vietnam as he so crudely puts it? Or does he rather mean that, now the war is over, the public/media/government are looking to ‘clean-up’ their image from their involvement in what proved to be a hugely unpopular military operation and could likewise extend an offer to simultaneously help clean up Israel’s global image?


P121/22
Many Palestinians have suffered greatly, but it was not because of their suffering that Nasser (second president of Egypt) went to war [with Israel] in 1967. Nasser didn't want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel. […] If the Arab states did not deliberately exploit the Palestinians for political purposes, then the kindest interpretation of their conduct is that they were utterly incompetent. [However, Bellow does concede how it] is true that Israel might have done more for the refugees, over the years. The efforts made to indemnify those who had lost their lands and homes were far from adequate.


P131
I sometimes think there are two Israels. The real one is territorially insignificant. The other, the mental Israel, is immense, a country inestimably important, playing a major role in the world, as broad as all history - and perhaps as deep as sleep.


P153/4
The Palestinians, says Harkabi, form a distinct group among the Arabs and do not feel themselves at home in the neighboring Arab countries. "Among the refugees," he writes, "a state of mind developed which stigmatized assimilation into Arab societies as an act of disloyalty." Some Palestinians resist efforts to improve living conditions in the camps lest this be taken as an admission that they have surrendered the hope of returning.
Harkabi distinguishes between the older generation of refugees with their longing to recover their land and property, their idyll of the days before the disaster, and the younger generation which has replaced nostalgia with hatred and whose aim is not to recover the lost villages of their fathers but to return as conquerors and masters. This new generation, mixing Marxism with terrorism, has chosen Mao Tse-tung, Fanon, and Che Guevara as its favorite theoreticians, and its ideological preferences have won for it the sympathy and support of the European left.
The Palestinians are Pan-Arabists, but their acquaintance with the Arab states "did not always endear these states to the Palestinians, for they indeed had their fill of bitters with them," Harkabi quaintly writes. They have received some support but they have also been exploited and abused.
The opinion of Professor Malcolm H. Kerr, given in 1971 in The Arab Cold War, is that a "longstanding Westem myth holds that the Palestine cause unites the Arab states when they are divided on all else. It would be more accurate to say that when the Arabs are in a mood to cooperate, this tends to find expression in an agreement to avoid action on Palestine, but that when they choose to quarrel, Palestine policy readily becomes a subject of dispute. The prospect that one Arab govemment or another may unilaterally provoke hostilities with Israel arouses fears among others for their own security, or at least for their political reputation." The armies of neighboring Arab states entered Israel in 1948 not primarily to protect the Palestinians but to prevent their rivals from expanding their territories.


(Above and below are damning outlooks towards the Palestinian position)


P158
Zionists were not deliberately unjust, the Arabs were not guiltless. To rectify the evil as the Arabs would wish it rectifed would mean the destruction of Israel. Arab refugees must be relieved and compensated, but Israel will not commit suicide for their sake. […] A sweeping denial of Arab grievances is, however, an obstacle to peace.
Golda Meir is sometimes accused of arguing that the Zionists had done the Arabs no injury whatever. In the London Sunday Times of June 15, 1969, she is quoted as saying, "It was not as though there were a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist." Precisely speaking, she is right. "Palestinian" is a word given prominence recently by Arab nationalists. The Arabs always held that the Palestinian problem was a Pan-Arab problem. Palestine to them was southern Syria. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Arab nationalists rejected the very idea of a separate Palestinian entity, insisting that the Arab lands were an indivisible whole. To Mrs. Meir this is no mere quibble. Under the influence of Arab propaganda the entire world now speaks of a "Palestinian homeland" and a "Palestinian people," and the word "Palestinian" has become a weapon. But what of the Arabs who were displaced in 1948?
Many undoubtedly did displace themselves. When hostilities began, they fled not into exile but to familiar territory on the West Bank. Marie Syrkin, a professor at Brandeis University, writes, "Nobody enjoys seeing his property used by others even if compensation is available. But the very proximity of the abandoned neighborhood, while tantalizing, is the true measure of how little national loss the Arab from Palestine suffered. Even for so slight a cause as a new subway or urban relocation people are shifted larger distances and to stranger surroundings than the changes endured by the majority of the Arab refugees.


P160
Nation-states have never come into existence peacefully and without injustices. At the center of every state, at its very foundation, as one writer recently put it, lies a mass of corpses. “It was the historical tragedy of Zionism," says Laqueur, "that [Israel] appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map."

(This is untrue. There were “empty spaces.” The founding Zionists were, by the British, offered unused/unwanted land in Uganda under the Uganda Scheme, which they declined to accept. Instead, they insisted on their right to the Holy Land and would settle for no less.)


P180
The Arabs may speak of "liquidating" Israel, but as Israel has weapons of mass destruction the PLO and the Rejection Front might have to pay for such an attempt with the annihilation of their own people. "Once they realize that the only alternative to coexistence is mutual extinction a solution of the conflict will become possible," says Laqueur.

(Is this not ironic? A Jewish threat of ethnic annihilation in response to the calls for dissolution, disbanding, liquidation of the Jewish state? I think this has been written in bad taste.)


P182
It has been estimated that the Khmer Rouge has destroyed a million and a half Cambodians, apparently as part of a design for improvement and renewal. What is the meaning of such corpse-making? In ancient times the walls of captured cities in the Middle East were sometimes hung with the skins of the vanquished. That custom has died out. But the eagerness to kill for political ends - or to justify killing by such ends - is as keen now as it ever was.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got this from the audible plus library. I've never actually read anything by Bellow but I've known of him for quit a long time because of his conservative readers. My only critique of this book is that it is very much specific to one period in time. It was a little like reading one of the thousands of political books that are produced every week that are irrelevant in a month. However, the subject was israel so it definitely had more relevance and felt like reading someone's travel memoirs of coming to America in the early 1800s.

Plus Bellow is a very good writer and ....well.....conservative. Or at least he was definitely not a liberal and took several to task on their pro-socialist stances in the Henry Kissinger era.

And once again I'm left wishing I was Jewish.

[Antti · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is both depressing and inspiring, since I share most of the thoughts (and) prejudices) about Israel and the Middle East with Mr. Bellow. The general tone might be a bit conservative, but all kind of voices are heard. Perhaps the book lacks an Arab point of view, but then again this seems to be a deeply personal journey, so Bellow's choices have to be accepted.

[Ricardo Gomes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este livro teve o condão de diminuir as minhas certezas acerca do conflito Israelo/Árabe. Sem estas certezas, penso encontrar-me mais preparado a aprender sobre o assunto, procurando deixar de parte ideias pré-concebidas.

"Investe-se um grande grau de inteligência na ignorância quando se sente uma profunda necessidade de ilusão."

[Gavin Simms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written (of course) and surprisingly informative book - part travelogue, part reportage on the Israeli Palestinian issue. Reading it is to see how little has changed - for a part of the left, Israel is colonialist and imperialist and thus to be resisted. Also, it provided a fascinating glimpse into the people of power and academia and politics that Bellow frequently interacted with.

[Avital · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea Saul Bellow was a warm Jew who cherished Israel until reading this book. He tells about his visit, meetings and impressions. Very interesting.

[Adam]

Not much has changed in the Middle East since 76

[John Hubbard · Rating 2 out of 5]

No real reason to read this unless you are finishing up going through Bellow's works.