A foot in both camps

As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tugging on his father’s sleeve, he said: ‘Daddy, we have to win this prize.’ Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird’s memoir of growing up in the Middle East, is full of such generosity and innocence.

In 1956, Kai’s father, Eugene Bird, moved his young family from Oregon to East Jerusalem, where he was to serve as American vice-consul in a city divided in two by the 1949 armistice line. Kai grew up in a rented villa half a mile from the lovely old American Colony boarding house in the Arab East — now Tony Blair’s Jerusalem ‘gaff’— and crossed over to the Anglican Mission School in the Israeli West through the barbed-wire and check points of Mandelbaum Gate. Above their house, Kai could hear the roaring of a lion from a Biblical Zoo kept by the Israelis on Mount Scopus.

If Kai’s parents were ‘blank slates’ — good-hearted, industrious, churchy, not especially well-informed — he passed between the two warring camps as ‘an exotic and privileged observer’ right up to and including his marriage to a Jewish fellow student at college in Minnesota, Susan Goldmark.

Bird is a good writer. American Prom- etheus, his book with Martin Sherwin on the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, more than merited its Pulitzer and, in this country, the Duff Cooper Prize. Yet Crossing Mandelbaum Gate is miscellaneous and a little muffled in comparison.

On the plus side, remote events such as Suez in 1956, the June War in 1967 and Black September in 1970 are as clear and fresh as yesterday. That is no small achievement.