![]() With all this in my background, my fairy tale’s first line was as truthful as it was unsubtle: “Oh how I wish I could go to the Holy Land.” The rest of the story is about an angel on a flying donkey who takes an English girl named Louise on a ride to Jerusalem. After snatching the city away from the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century, Omar the Great made our family’s ancestor High Judge of Jerusalem, and from that point on my family has served the Holy City as judges, teachers, Sufi sages, politicians, and as doorkeepers to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In a city whose lanes were too narrow and crooked for a tank, this massive oak door still gave off a sense of impenetrability. ![]() Peter and the Pearly Gates, unlock a door thick enough to withstand a battering ram. Sometimes, when I watched my uncle’s camels graze among ruins of Suq al-Khawajat, or Goldsmith’s Souk, which had belonged to the Nusseibehs from time immemorial, the sensation of being a character in an ancient story swept through me-as it did when I watched a different uncle, the doorkeeper of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, take a foot-long skeleton key and, as in the story that my Christian friends told me of St. That awe was so strong that as a child 1,300 years later, I couldn’t walk to the corner market without feeling it all the way to my fingertips. Magical landscape? When my ancestors arrived in Jerusalem from Arabia thirteen centuries ago, the city’s history was already so hallowed by time-and of course by the ancient Jewish prophets who once roamed its streets-that it left the newcomers from the desert in awe. Fairy tales are also in my blood, and how could it be otherwise, with my having been raised surrounded by such a timeless and ALMOST FORTY YEARS At the time I was, as I remain, under the thrall of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for in it I saw how a children’s yarn could say more than a dozen philosophical treatises. It was second nature for me to use myth to get across something so important. But how do you ask the daughter of a famous Oxford don to follow you to the war-scarred, embattled, poor, and occupied city of Jerusalem? How do you break the news that your fate will be tied to one of the most volatile corners on the planet, with two major wars in its recent history and the Arab leaders worldwide calling for another? It seemed too preposterous even to try, so I wrote a fairy tale instead. But I wanted to return, and I wanted her to go with me. Had I intended to stay in exile, the love that Lucy and I shared perhaps would have raised fewer eyebrows. The children of the privileged and educated, including all five of my siblings, began heading for the exits. By contrast, I no longer had a country, and the old ruling class my father represented had been plunged into a crisis from which it would never recover. Lucy was expected to marry into the British intelligentsia and to pursue a dazzling academic career of her own. ![]() Lucy was the daughter of John Austin, one of England’s mightiest modern philosophers, and I was the nineteenyear-old son of a man who had spent the last twenty years serving a Jordanian-administered Palestine, an entity recently wiped off the map in six brief days. We were both students at Oxford, which at least on the surface was where our similarities ended. Everyone agreed at the time, including the two of us, that it was an odd match. Ī Fairy Tale ago the Israeli army conquered Jerusalem, a city my family had lived in since the days of Omar the Great, and soon afterward I fell in love with Lucy. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at. Copyright infringement is against the law. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. Or visit us online at us./newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Thank you for buying this Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook. Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page
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