Words To Quote

"...but even worse...would be the sealing of yet another trade route from West to East because of squabbling among the faiths. One by one they are being lost..the followers of Islam and Christianity, who in violation of God's desire and teaching and above all his good sense would rather kill than haggle."

Michael Chabon,
"Gentlemen of the Road"
pp. 108-109
paperback edition,
Ballantine Books, 2008


An insight:

At the end of Gentlemen of the Road...Michael Chabon has a quiet afterword with his readers, in which he confides that, despite the book’s official title, he cannot help but think of it as “Jews with Swords”, a working title that has not failed to cause amusement in those who heard it first. The author is not so inclined to find it entirely a laughing matter. The Jews, after all, he sees as arch-adventurers, and not the less adventurous for having embarked on their long history of persecution and peregrination in a spirit of reluctance, or even unreadiness. Their great warrior tradition (“Here’s to Judas Maccabeus, / Boy, if he could only see us”, as Tom Lehrer once put it) can be obscured only too easily by the image of Woody Allen “backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier”. The gentlemen of the road in Gentlemen of the Road seldom waver, or wisecrack, or retreat.