In 1986, Rabbi David Blumenfeld was
shot in the Arab Market of the Old City of Jerusalem. In 1998, his daughter Laura
Blumenfeld, a reporter for the Washington Post, spent a year exploring the
issue of revenge and how she, herself, might be able to exact revenge against
shooter for her father. This is the premise behind Laura Blumenfeld book aptly
entitled Revenge: A Story of Hope.

When Rabbi Blumenfeld received a head wound from a
shot fired by a young Palestinian fanatic, he did not let it ruin his life or
pardon the pun, let it go to his head. Unfortunately, the same could not be
said for his daughter Laura, who was a journalism student at Harvard at the
time of the shooting. For her, the minor head wound was a much greater injury.
Laura became a writer for the Washington Post and arranged a leave of absence
to coincide with her “honeymoon year” to travel to the Middle East and write an
impartial study on the topic of revenge. During this first year of marriage,
Baruch Weis, her new husband and New York City lawyer, spend the major of the
year in NYC finish a rather tricky federal case and cementing his bid for becoming
a judge. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Laura spent the year making plans for her
revenge rather than the more tradition preoccupation of “making babies”.
Instead of getting to know her new husband, she spends her time getting to know
the family of the shooter who was at that time in prison and beyond her reach.
True to her promise to the Post, she travels throughout the Middle East and
around the Mediterranean Basin talking to victims and their families who had
plotted revenge, been part of a revenge resolution ritual, or had successfully
and unsuccessfully taken part in acts of revenge. She also explored the topic
with sociologists and psychologist as well as with legal, religious, and
political experts in the field of revenge. She talked to Moslems, Christians,
Jews, mystics, shamans, and Bedouins. In the end, however, it was her
relationship with her father and mother, the shooter’s family, and finally the
shooter himself, that help her to enter into the very heart of revenge.

Revenge: A Story of Hope is
an emotional exploration of the human psyche. It explores the deeply biological
drives to remove personal shame and to redeem familial or communal honor. If
the reader is open to it, this book can be a workbook for exploring one’s own
history of being wounded, a personal definition of what constitutes personal
injury, one’s conscious and unconscious pattern for exacting revenge, and even
the more complex issues of power, honor, and shame. This book can be a quick
read, but to walk away from it untouched is to ignore our own festering wounds
and to refuse the soothing and healing balm that this book has to offer.

Laura Blumenfeld is a journalist
for The Washington Post and a
guest writer for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine,
and The Los Angles Times. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism
from Harvard and a master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia
University. She lives in Washington, DC
with her husband, Baruch Weiss and their two children. Revenge: A Story of
Hope (2002) is her first book.

Revenge: A Story of Hope by
Laura Blumenfeld is a deeply personal and potentially social impacting book. It
will change you, if you let it. This will be an award winner! I give this book
the highest of recommendations!

[JUST IN: “HBO is making a movie out of Revenge. It will be directed by
Julie Taymor (The Lion King), produced by Wendy Finerman (Forrest
Gump), and written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Tony Kushner (Angels
in America).”]

© 2003 Su
Terry