Masterful evocation of a time (1947, Syria), with its desperate escapes by night, for both a people and a parchment. Shades of Le Carré in Friedman's probing of the distant memories of ageing players, in his intimate depiction of a scattered community, and in his discovery of a web of obfuscation...
By this time you couldn’t avoid the stickers saying GET OUT OF LEBANON IN PEACE. Support for an immediate pullout, recently a fringe opinion, was now common. The security zone had been crucial not long before, the lives expended there necessary. Now we started to hear that it might be a mistake. ...