This is a story about revenge

In March of 1986, Laura Blumenfeld ’86-87

was a junior in Quincy when she received an unexpected phone call from her father

An English concentrator, she was active in Hillel, HAND, and--yes--the Lampoon. The phone call was a warning, telling her not to believe the news.

Her father, a New York rabbi, had been traveling in Jerusalem—–but Laura had not yet heard the reports claiming he was dead...

David Blumenfeld had just been shot by Omar Khatib, a young member of a radical faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. His attempted murder was part of a conspiracy to kill tourists in Jerusalem in order to attract international attention to their cause; the group would claim three victims in the coming days. David was lucky. The bullet went high, grazing his scalp, and he recovered quickly and completely. Laura, meanwhile, struggled to find a way to come to terms with what she later called “my first brush with evil.”

In her English seminar that week, Laura was asked to write about a recent event. She responded with an angry poem addressed to her father’s shooter, which ended with the promise, “this hand will find you / I am his daughter.” In a recent interview with The Crimson, she recalled the emotional roller coaster she was on as she wrote the poem, her sense of confusion and powerlessness, as though her entire world had been turned upside down. The poem disguised her fears beneath a façade of anger and threats. It was, she said, “just a fantasy,” certainly not something she ever expected to act on. It was just a dream she played out in her head.

Revenge: A Story of Hope is the fulfillment of this dream. A gripping combination of personal journal and cultural study, it chronicles her efforts in 1998 to track down the shooter and his family with the goal of finally taking some kind of revenge. Although the rest of her family—including her father—had little trouble in moving on with their lives, the attack remained etched in the back of her mind. The shooting threatened her values and dehumanized her father. At base, she writes, she wanted her father’s attacker “to realize he was wrong.”

On a business trip to Jerusalem in the late 1990s, she had spotted the word “revenge” spraypainted across an archway, inspiring her to follow through on her poem’s promise. It is here that her story takes off, beginning a whirling journey through a generally unexplored world, as Blumenfeld travels from her new home in Jerusalem to Europe, America and the Middle East, examining the ways revenge is treated in different cultures. Although at times the reader may wish for a stronger sense of chronology, the book skillfully combines personal journal with thoughtful analysis. Whether it’s in Sicily, where she learns of the Mafia’s ways, Albania, where she studies a popular local book that dictates acceptable methods of revenge, or Iran, where she talks with a Grand Ayatollah, her travels are at once enjoyable travelogues and fascinating cultural studies.

But Revenge is, in the end, the remarkable story of a young woman who wouldn’t forget. While Laura’s research on revenge is enlightening, the book revolves around her relationship with the shooter’s family. During her year in Jerusalem, Laura learns that the shooter, Omar Khatib, is still serving time for the attack. She manages to track down his family and, introducing herself to the Khatibs only as Laura, an American journalist covering the Middle East, begins the hugely emotional process of befriending them. She struggles to keep her composure at times, such as when a 12-year-old member of the family laughs about “some Jew” Omar tried to kill. As Laura writes, “There were moments when the journalist in me took over, when I listened to an account from the shooter’s life and was charmed. Then I would remember my father with a pang and think—but you tried to kill him.” Nonetheless, she finds herself becoming unnervingly comfortable with them, and begins having the family smuggle her letters to Omar. The climax is a finale so unexpected and breathtaking that it would be entirely implausible as fiction.

Revenge tells a dramatic and personal story, while also providing intelligent and well-written commentary on revenge culture and the Middle East conflict. Blumenfeld’s training as a journalist is evident through its clear and readable prose, and her sense of humor and appealing personality shine through.

It is a book that draws the reader deep into the author’s mind, something with which Laura is not entirely comfortable—she became a journalist, she explains, because she wanted to write about others. There was, however, no way to avoid the profoundly personal nature of her story and, indeed, that is what makes it great. She recently talked with Bill Clinton, who called to praise the book and mentioned how he related to Laura’s brother’s difficulty with her parents’ divorce. While this public intimacy with her life may be understandably disconcerting for her, it reflects how successfully her book makes its readers feel like privileged confidants.

Much of the story memorialized by the book is still ongoing. Laura is still in touch with the Khatib family, though she reports that since the outbreak of the most recent violence the family has become increasingly difficult to contact; both phone lines and mail services are no longer working. Just last month, however, she traveled to Israel with her father, and together they went to meet the Khatibs, a meeting Laura called “the world’s craziest blind date.” Despite initial awkwardness, she reports that it went well; it ended with the passing of a hookah, which she couldn’t help but see as a symbolic peace pipe.

In the end, Laura Blumenfeld did get revenge, but not according to traditional expectations. It was, as her father would say, constructive revenge: she made Omar Khatib realize his mistake and acknowledge the humanity of his would-be victim. Omar is still in jail, but has begun corresponding with Laura’s father and, in an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC, freely acknowledged that Laura had made him see the error of his ways.

This is an improbably optimistic story, whose simple message is that if people could only get to know their enemies, the animosity would ebb away and the cycle of revenge would die out. While its applicability to the Middle East is painfully evident, its simple truth is relevant to any conflict. Read this book, not only because it is well-written and thoroughly enjoyable, but because Laura’s is a message that needs to be spread.