REVENGE

Journalist Blumenfeld builds ties with the man who shot her father ten years earlier, explores her own family history, and documents the practice of revenge around the world.

In 1986, a Palestinian terrorist took aim at Blumenfeld’s father and squeezed off a single shot, grazing Blumenfeld père’s scalp but leaving him very much alive. At the time, Harvard student Laura vowed revenge. Over a decade later, she returned to live in Jerusalem with a twin purpose: to start a life with her new husband, and to find the man who tried to take her father’s life. Revenge is not a comfortable impulse for this child of privilege, but Blumenfeld finds herself possessed with a need to do something, although she’s not sure what. She spends her time seeking out the shooter’s family, attempting to visit the gunman in jail, and flying around the world researching how other cultures process the revenge drive. In Sicily, “cradle of the vendetta,” she interviews priests and Mafia victims. In Albania, she learns of the canon, a catalogue of revenge obligations as ubiquitous as the phone book. Iran’s Grand Ayatollah, who bears a marked resemblance to the author’s grandfather, pronounces that she is entitled to even the score but not overshoot it. In Israel, she interviews plenty of people with opinions on revenge, Leah Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu among them. Meanwhile, her parents are uneasy with her obsession, and her husband begins to keep a log of days when he finds the marriage “intolerable and insufferable.” This interweaving of daily life with a drive for vengeance, of the revenge stories of others, and of a final startling showdown of mercy for the shooter himself, makes for a gripping read.

Rich, graceful, intimate, and absorbing.