What would happen if one climbed atop the roofs in Galizia, where Jerusalem’s Old City converges, and logged on to Tinder to check out potential dating partners? Christian pilgrims, local Armenians, hard-line Zionists, Palestinian Islamists, a few tourists — who else would you find? Where’s the best place to grab a hookah in Jerusalem? What about the most happening bars? What are the hook-up spots in a city that is a perpetual conflict zone?

Dating amidst millennia-old religious flashpoints is pretty challenging, even if adventurous, especially if you’re going out with one of ‘the other’. And that’s only one of the human elements that Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered: One Woman’s Year in the Heart of the Christian, Muslim, Armenian and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem explores as it looks into the everyday lives of ordinary people who have had the burden of their community’s interpretation of history thrust upon them.

“This is where the roots of Abraham/Ibrahim divide, where brother is pitted against brother, and we, the cousins a millennia later, fight it out.”

A journalist explores everyday life in the four quarters of Old Jerusalem

The author, Sarah Tuttle-Singer, pens her observations of the place and its people through a string of interviews conducted in the holy city as she spends three months each in the four quarters of Jerusalem: Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian, where “time is measured in Shabbat sirens and church bells ... [and] in the call of the muezzin that echoes off the stone.”

Tuttle-Singer, an American Jew, begins the narration of her ‘love story’ by describing her first trip to Israel. At the age of 16, her mother asked her to visit what many Orthodox Jews consider their ‘ancestral country’ for the summer, and the unenthusiastic teenager acquiesced to a trip that would eventually redefine her existence. This wasn’t necessarily owing to the religious reconnection with her Orthodox Jewish roots; the summer of 1999 was memorable for the author because of the experience of drinking delicious coffee next to a tree growing out of the stone, watching Armenian seminary students march toward Zion Gate, memories of hookah pipes, shofars [musical horns] and Sabbath candles, eating falafels next to Jaffa Gate and kissing a Gazan — not necessarily in that order.

Tuttle-Singer’s connection with Jerusalem goes back to the early 20th century when her great-grandmother worked as an au pair with a Polish family. She fell in love with a non-Jewish official of the Ottoman Empire, for which she was shipped back to Poland. Later she fled to the United States where she met the author’s great-grandfather.

After Tuttle-Singer had fallen in love with Israel — and specifically Jerusalem — during her first trip to the city, she made it a point to revisit the next summer and then again the year after. But the latter trip ended up serving a brutal reality check to her budding love story as the then 18-year-old was mauled by stones in a violent uprising near Damascus Gate. Tuttle-Singer didn’t visit Israel again for a long time after that. Only two brief trips were sandwiched between the author finding herself wounded next to Damascus Gate and eventually ‘returning’ to the city — now with two kids and the baggage of divorce.

In the meantime, the Second Intifada had come and gone, negotiations between the two sides had failed and Israel had built a wall that cut into large swathes of Palestinian land, all the while expanding the settlements. Now Tuttle-Singer was living in Jerusalem as a journalist affiliated with The Times of Israel, an online publication launched in 2012. Following a new wave of violence in 2015, the author ended up splitting 12 months among the four sections of the city, meeting a wide array of people and penning down their stories.

The author describes Jaffa Gate — one of the seven main open gates in the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City — as the nexus point where Palestinians and Israelis share space. She highlights the increasing number of Palestinian women who are now covering their heads and wearing conservative dress despite having worn jeans in the past. As one admits, “it was easier to run and throw rocks in jeans.” She speaks to a homophobic orthodox co-religionist who was taught to hate LGBT people all his life, only to realise, at the age of 60, that he was gay himself. She describes little boys in yarmulkes and little girls in hijab who line up to meet Santa Claus, and taxi drivers of both Jewish and Arab descent who drive the same kind of taxi and use the same cuss words.

“And that’s the funny thing — for how much we hate each other sometimes, we look alike. We use similar syntax. We shrug our shoulders and roll our eyes the same way, and praise God’s glorious name, and curse each other’s mother’s vaginas. And yet, there’s this sense of the Other. Of wanting to know — is he a Jew? Is he an Arab? I guess it boils down to tribalism. And trust.”

Tuttle-Singer is well-known for being a staunch critic of the Israeli occupation, stating that “#NeverAgain cannot just be about Jews.” In fact, there is currently a petition on change.org to ‘End the Subversion of Sarah Tuttle-Singer Against the State of Israel’. Yet in her book there is no self-hatred, which is an oft-cited characteristic of many Jewish critics of Israel. In fact, the only thing Tuttle-Singer appears defensive about in the entire book is having Taylor Swift on her playlist.

The visible intention of Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered is to showcase the side of the Palestine-Israel region that is often buried under the rubble of religiously charged violence. The author describes the affiliation that Jewish and Muslim communities have with Jerusalem through a story about King Solomon: a baby girl is claimed by two mothers and the king orders for the baby to be cut in half. The true mother shouts that the child be given to the other woman and not be hurt. “Jerusalem is like that baby, only neither mother will relent. And Jerusalem will be ripped to ragged pieces by those who say they love her best.”

But Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered isn’t about the ripping itself, or an insight into why it was and continues to be quartered in the first place. It argues — without spelling out as such in those words — that at the heart of those who continue to religiously rip the land they love, is the desire to maybe not have to do so.

The reviewer is a Lahore-based journalist

Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered: One
Woman’s Year in the Heart of the Christian,
Muslim, Armenian and Jewish Quarters
of Old Jerusalem
By Sarah Tuttle-Singer
Skyhorse, US
ISBN: 978-1510724891
272pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 16th, 2018