American Hard Cover Edition
Holt Rinehart & Winston 1978
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On the
last day of December 1921, three men sat down to a game
of poker in the back room of an antiquities shop in Jerusalem:
* Cairo Martyr
an enigmatic black giant from Africa who controlled
the supply of aphrodisiac mummy dust in the Middle East.
a blue-eyed Moslem and former slave determined to revenge
the injustices done to his people.
* O'Sullivan Beare a disillusioned and wily Irish
patriot who was making a fortune in the Holy Land from
the sale of spurious Christian artifacts that were undeniably
phallic in shape.
* Munk Szondi
dedicated Zionist and once the youngest colonel in the
AustroHungarian Imperial Army, a scion of the powerful
Budapest Jewish banking House of Szondi, which was run
by a matriarchal directorate known as The Sarahs.
The Great Jerusalem
Poker Game, as it came to be called, continued for twelve
years - the stakes nothing less than the control of
Jerusalem itself. Thousands of gamblers from around
the world lost fortunes trying to win the Holy City,
but in the end there were only three men at the table,
the same three who had been there in the beginning.
The lives of these
three gamblers become entwined with an English lord
who wrote a thirty-three volume study of Levantine sex
in the nineteenth century, a Trappist monk from Albania
who forged the world's oldest Bible, an idealistic gunrunner
named Stern, a revered black archaeologist who built
a spacious apartment for himself inside the Great Pyramid,
and a tiny Japanese aristocrat, Baron Kikuchi, who converted
to Judaism and practiced Zen archery on the slopes of
Mt. Sinai.
But before the
final round of poker begins, yet another contender for
the ultimate hegemony of the eternal city appears: Nubar
Wallenstein, heir to the largest oil syndicate in the
world and a fanatical alchemist, whose crazed quest
for immortality leads him to develop a vast spy network
dedicated to destroying the three cosmic cardplayers
and taking over Jerusalem.
Where else could
such an epic poker game for the secret control of Jerusalem
be played but in the antiquities shop belonging to Haj
Harun, the three thousand-year-old knight-errant who
emerged as the guardian of the Holy City in Edward Whittemore's
last novel, Sinai Tapestry.
Read/Download
the Jerusalem Poker Prologue here. (It is missing from the Old Earth Books 1st edition, and also from the Open Road Media eBook edition)
"Comedy, horror,
wit, tragedy, erudition, and breathtaking imagination
and
it is romantic, as great fantasy dressed in truth must
always be." Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Whittemore
presents himself as one of the last, best arguments
against television. He's an author of extraordinary
talents, albeit one who eludes comparison with other
writers
..The milieu is one which readers of espionage
novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it's totally
transformed - by the writers wild humour, his mystical
bent, and his bicameral perception of history and time
.If
Whittemore were no more than an "entertainer" his novels would be worth their price. But he does something
more difficult than intellectual vaudeville. He assassinates
the banal, revealing the authentic current of madness
that courses through human affairs, reminding us that
the fantastic is ubiquitous, invisible only because
we've shut our eyes to it" Harpers
"If the price
of whiskey goes up again and the wife leaves me, I'll
sit down and reread this book. "
Hugh Murphy, reader, County Donegal
Reviews of
Jerusalem Poker:
Introduction
to Old Earth Books edition by Lesley Hazleton
Catholicism
Beserk in the Holy Land - a review of Jerusalem Poker
by Jim Hougan
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