We are delighted to welcome back author Howard Kaplan to Omnimystery News today.
Howard last visited with us in December when his thriller The Damascus Cover was re-released. Since then, the second in the series, Bullets of Palestine, has been re-published, and we had the opportunity to catch up with the very busy author to talk more about his work.
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Omnimystery News: Give us an overview of the Jerusalem Spy Series.
Photo provided courtesy of
Howard Kaplan
Howard Kaplan: The Jerusalem Spy Series initially will be comprised of 3 novels that share a common theme: reconciliation and hope. Between Israel and the Arab countries in The Damascus Cover and between Israelis and Palestinians in Bullets of Palestine and the forthcoming To Destroy Jerusalem. Damascus and Bullets were originally published in hardcover and paperback years ago and have been reissued as eBooks and new trade paperback editions. To Destroy Jerusalem is a never before published work that I'm finishing now and expect to bring out in early 2016. The film version of The Damascus Cover, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Sir John Hurt, Olivia Thirlby, Jurgen Prochnow and Navid Negabhan (Abu Wazir from Homeland) finished shooting at the end of July 2015 with some final scenes filmed in Jerusalem; most of the movie was shot in Morocco to stand in for Syria where the bulk of the action takes place.
Bullets and Jerusalem share the same two protagonists, one Israeli, one Palestinian. The head of the Israeli Secret Service, the Colonel, is a pivotal figure in all 3 novels. We were very fortunate to get John Hurt to play him in Damascus. Bullets takes place in 1987, 10 years after Damascus. In the second novel, the Colonel's a bit potty, loses track of small things, yet has the will and clarity to mount a complex operation unknown to those above him who have pushed him out. The last large scale war between Israel and the Arab states was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I think what's happened in the region in those 10 years is that the threat of another war between Israel and its neighbors — Syria, Jordan and Egypt — has been supplanted by treaties and the realization by those Arab counties that they cannot push Israel into the sea. So by the 1980s it's clear the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is center stage so that's where Bullets is set including during the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in an attempt to clear the border, which completely failed. Mere power can protect but not solve a conflict. By the third novel, set in 1991, the Colonel is no longer mounting operations but is in retirement by the sea, brewing sun tea. He remains a spiritual center for Shai Shaham, the Israeli spy at the heart of the latter two novels, who Shai visits when in need or in doubt.
Bullets is about two agents. Two opposing sides. Shai is dispatched to eliminate a terrorist threat. To succeed on his mission Shai must win the trust of Palestinian Agent Ramzy Awwad, who will help him gain access to the extremist and dangerous Abu Nidal, who is killing Israelis, Jews AND moderate Palestinian agents across Europe. Shai is under orders to kill Ramzy when the mission ends. Instead they forge a friendship that rises above the enmity and hatred between their sides. Loyalties are tested. Will they capture Abu Nidal (who was a real historical figure) or betray each other. In this conflict of dehumanization of the other, these are two extremely human men, caught in a larger war. Shai bears an uncanny resemblance to my old friend, Avraham Infeld, who lives in Jerusalem and is President Emeritus of Hillel on college campuses worldwide. We have been friends for 45 years. Infeld's an exuberant larger than life person and over the years he's shared a great deal about himself, is a bit of an older brother to me, and I've borrowed shamelessly from all he's shared with me.
Ramzy is both a spy, and a novelist and short story writer. He has made a journey from attacking an Israeli Embassy in Paraguay and killing both men and women, to now working and befriending Israelis. He's based on a real life Palestinian novelist and terrorist named Ghassan Kanafani. Kanafani is not much known in the West though his novels and short stories have been translated into English. His most famous work Men in the Sun was made into a well known Arabic film. Though he was the propaganda head for George Habash's extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, his fiction was unusually balanced and fair. For example, while many Iranian leaders declare the Holocaust never happened, Kanafani wrote a novella, Return to Haifa, about a Palestinian family who goes back to Haifa to see their old home. They find Holocaust survivors in it; the narrator has great empathy for their suffering. He believes they deserve a home, but not his home. So I took Kanafani, stripped him of his radical associations and made Ramzy a mainstream PLO agent what today would be part of Mohammad Abbas' Palestinian authority.
Due to this pairing Bullets has garnered great reviews from both Israeli and Jewish newspapers and major Arab newspapers. Al Fajr (Jerusalem Palestinian Weekly) wrote:
"In a conflict where both sides have tended to dehumanize the other, Kaplan has created two extremely human characters — one Palestinian, the other Israeli. In observing such a fictional relationship I found myself looking at the Israelis that I came across this week in a slightly different manner. I found I wanted to try and shed some of the stereotypes that living on one side of the conflict had given me. Maybe this is the purpose of fiction in the first place — to break down barriers."
Though I've had fabulous and thoughtful reviews of both books in mainstream newspapers around the world, this review touched me deeper than any of them. It represents even more than I hoped for in conceiving these novels.
All my characters, the Colonel, Shai and Ramzy evolve greatly within each novel and even more so from book to book. I've set the novels a number of years apart to make this easier to achieve and more pronounced. We all change with age. I find my interest in my characters is greatly about change and growth, with some substantial back sliding, so I've always felt doing so would make the characters more interesting to readers as well as to myself.
OMN: How much of your own personal experience have you included in the books?
HK: I had some experiences when I was 21 and 22 traveling to the Soviet Union to smuggle out a dissident's manuscript on microfilm, and transferring another manuscript, on my second trip, to the Dutch Ambassador inside his Embassy. Under the Soviets, all unpublished writing remained property of the Communist State, so émigrés would have to leave all their uncensored works behind. On my second trip I was arrested, interrogated by the KGB for four days and then released. They grabbed me in the Ukraine for meeting with dissidents, I had nothing incriminating on me and they did not know about the manuscripts I'd transferred. It was rather a benign interrogation in the hotel manager's office, with bathroom and food breaks available. In the end they brought a prosecutor to my hotel room and expelled me on my scheduled flight to London, citing a humanitarian gesture. It was the era of détente and I think my American passport really did protect me so I was nervous but not panicked. They arrested me on the tenth day of a fourteen day tour, held me for four days in house arrest and would not let me contact the Embassy. Had they held me beyond my scheduled flight I think I'd have been terrified. I worked too with sending other college students into Russia to meet dissidents so what I learned through these colleagues in London, who remain among my closest friends decades later, created a mindset that permeates my thrillers.
Bullets is different than the other two novels in that it is based throughout on historical events. As I mentioned, Abu Nidal is a real person. He shot the Israeli Ambassador to Great Britain, Shlomo Argov in London — a scene that is recreated at the beginning of the novel — in order to goad the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, into invading Lebanon. Sharon was quite happy to oblige. Abu Nidal wanted the PLO crushed by the Israelis for being too moderate. The Israeli Army took me into Lebanon at the time on a journalist junket so I was able to witness some of The Lebanon War first hand. There is an infamous real event when the Christian Phalange party stormed the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, south of Beirut, the night sky lit by the Israeli forces, who believed the PLO was ensconced in the twin camps. They had fled. I put Ramzy into Shatilla during this event to witness the massacre of the women, children and elders still in the camps. It tests his will to cooperate with the Israelis.
OMN: How true are you to the settings in the books?
HK: Writing these novels has opened the doors to a lot of places and people. I've spent a lot of time in Arab East Jerusalem, and in Arab villages throughout the region and Gaza. I've been greeted with remarkable interest and hospitality. I did my junior year abroad at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. My Hebrew is fluent, so I'm treated a bit less like an outsider in Israeli circles due to language competency.
Because I travel to as many places as I can to write these books, I am utterly and fanatically scrupulous with facts and geographical terrain. Abu Nidal attacked the Socialist International in Albufeira Portugal on the Algarve Coast, so I spent a week there. I was in Syria and Damascus long before the horrendous upheavals there and one of the things that has been noted most often in both press and customer reviews of The Damascus Cover is the detailed description of the city. I did not know when I wrote it that so much would soon be destroyed so the novel stands as a bit of an artifact in its descriptions of what was. When Dutton originally bought Damascus the editor gave me a copy of Harry's Game by Gerald Seymour which had fabulous descriptions of Northern Ireland. The editor told me he wanted to smell, feel, know Damascus through this novel and he encouraged me to emulate Gerald Seymour in the rewrite. I was happy to learn.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?
HK: As far as writing help and mentors, a pitfall I've noticed for beginning writers is that they solicit opinions of their work from too many people. In essence everybody will have an opinion and by definition they will differ, so getting too much help generally creates confusion rather than clarity. I've found it preferable, if possible to find only one person to show my work to. I was greatly lucky in my early years of writing to meet Michael Blankfort. Blankfort published 14 novels and wrote many screenplays, the most well known The Caine Mutiny. When I met him I was 22 and he 65. He had a stable of young writers he helped among them Kate Braverman and he worked on her first highly acclaimed novel, Lithium for Medea. For ten years until he died in a terrible fall, I had lunch with him about every ten days. I used to ask him questions like, "Can you do this …" He'd say: "Try it and we'll see." He was also merciless about scenes that didn't work. He'd just line diagonally across the entire page without any emotion both in his work and mine. He taught me that nobody cares about your process or angst, that it's only what's on the page when you're finished that matters. So when I got to Dutton they were a little floored at how readily I took direction for a first novel. I learned from Blankfort it is all about making the work better and the vast hours spent on material you then need to toss is the way writing is.
OMN: Give us an update on the film adaptation of The Damascus Cover.
HK: The film adaptation of The Damascus Cover has been a total treat. The director wrote the script and did show me a copy and invited suggestions. I made a few, all of which he took. I have an enormous sense that this is his film and I have my book. There are a number of departures from the novel in the film, all of which I like. It's a different medium. The film is a bit less dark than the novel. Maybe all this camaraderie, which I gather is atypical, is because he's done such a fabulous job on the film. I did not have a clear notion of who would play Ari, the main character, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers' performance is beyond anything I could have dreamed for. I was on set in Casablanca for a week in February. Ari's cover is the German, Hans Hoffman, and Meyers plays the role with an impressive German accent. Over breakfast in the hotel, I asked the German actor, Jurgen Prochnow, known for Das Boot and The DaVinci Code how Jonny's accent sounded and he said with a smile, "Very familiar." Navid Negahban was at my house for a BBQ in July, he plays the Syrian General Sarraj and is best known for playing Abu Wazir in Homeland. He talked about how amazing Olivia Thirlby is his scenes. She's the love interest and I agreed. I saw those filmed, along with several of hers with Jonny. While he found his pitch readily and delivered take after take with the same precision; Thirlby, who is in her 20's and played the sister in Juno experimented with different deliveries and facial expressions until she and the director found her optimum spot. It was something unique to watch. I was shown some early edits for my opinion; again I made some suggestions that were taken. And then there's John Hurt. I never expected to have someone of that stature and talent play the Colonel. The film is expected to be in theaters in the spring of 2016.
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Howard Kaplan, a native of Los Angeles, has lived in Israel and traveled extensively through Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. At the age of 21, he had his own spy experience while attending school in Jerusalem, when he was sent on two missions into the Soviet Union to smuggle out a dissident's manuscript on microfilm. His first trip was a success. On his second trip, however, he was arrested in Khartiv and interrogated for two days in the Ukraine and two days in Moscow, before being released. He holds a BA in Middle East History from UC Berkeley, an MA in the Philosophy of Education from UCLA, and is the author of four novels.
For more information about the author, please find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Bullets of Palestine by Howard Kaplan
The Jerusalem Spy Series
Publisher: Howard Kaplan
Two agents. Two opposing sides.
Israeli Agent Shai is dispatched to eliminate a terrorist threat. To succeed in his mission Shai must win the trust of Palestinian Agent Ramzy who will help him gain access to the infamous and dangerous Abu Nidal.
Shai is under orders to kill Ramzy when the mission ends. Instead, they forge a friendship that transcends the hatreds of their heritage. Loyalties are tested. Will they capture Abu Nidal or betray each other? In a conflict where both sides dehumanize each other, two extremely human men, are caught in the cross-hairs of the larger war.
— Bullets of Palestine by Howard Kaplan
