From where he stood at that moment he could see the spot in Tiberias where he blew up the English lorry, the streets of Zefat in which he had used his machine gun, and he vowed that violence was behind him; he would try to be the kind of Jew that Akiba had been, a peasant who had passed the age of forty before learning how to read, a self-taught man who had become the legal master of his day, a man who at seventy launched a whole new way of life and who, when the Romans finally executed him by tearing away his flesh with hot pincers—a man ninety-five years old and perhaps not legally a Jew, for it was believed that he descended from Sisera, that lascivious general whom Jael had slain with a tent pin—proved himself so dedicated to God that when the Roman soldiers gripped the flesh near his heart, he forced himself to stay alive until he could finish his defiant cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” to die on the long, wailing pronunciation of the word “one.”
BY JAMES A. MICHENER
Tales of the South Pacific
The Fires of Spring
Return to Paradise
The Voice of Asia
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Sayonara
The Floating World
The Bridge at Andau
Hawaii
Report of the Country Chairman
Caravans
The Source
Iberia
Presidential Lottery
The Quality of Life
Kent State: What Happened and Why
The Drifters
A Michener Miscellany: 1950–1970
Centennial
Sports in America
Chesapeake
The Covenant
Space
Poland
Texas
Legacy
Alaska
Journey
Caribbean
The Eagle and the Raven
Pilgrimage
The Novel
James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook
Mexico
Creatures of the Kingdom
Recessional
Miracle in Seville
This Noble Land: My Vision for America
The World Is My Home
with A. Grove Day
Rascals in Paradise
with John Kings
Six Days in Havana
About the Author
JAMES A.MICHENER, one of the world’s most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the best-selling novels Hawaii, Texas, Chesapeake, The Covenant, and Alaska, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.
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