The Courage to Be Jewish and the Wife of an Arab Sheik

Book excerpt: What's a nice Brooklyn Jewish girl novelist with a fiddle doing married to an Arab Sheik dressed like a Queen of Egypt in the deserts? Playing the G-string. Comparing Mizrahi music to Klezmer and Taksim to Magham Seekah. Poetry found its mood here. At dawn I rose on October 25, 1963 to see the salmon slit that ripped the East. My eyes were weary, but the day had to begin. Above, a jet cracked the sky, leaving a feathery trail of scattering wisps of smoke. These clouds soon parted. And by the time the sun melted into the hot winds and its streams radiated to push the thermometer up to 120 degrees, I had packed and unfolded the first flaps of tent to start the new day. Between ethnomusicology, anthropology, and creative writing research, I had my hands full and two toddlers riding camelback.