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My interest in the topic of revenge and my subsequent two-year, virtually full-time immersion in writing this essay had their conscious origin in the reading of Laura Blumenfeld's memoir, Revenge: A Story of Hope (2002). That more than intellectual curiosity was driving my exploration would not become clear to me until the essay's near completion.
In her book Blumenfeld describes a train of events that began when her father, then a rabbi visiting in Israel, was shot during the Intifada by a Palestinian gunman. The wound was superficial; he was briefly treated in the local emergency room and sent home. Upon his return to the United States, he swiftly recovered from both the physical and the psychological effects of the trauma and regained his psychic balance, as did his son and his ex-wife. Not so his daughter Laura, a journalist with the Washington Post, who tenaciously brooded, obsessed, dreamt, wrote, and talked about the event over a ten-year-period—all with a nagging, per-sistent, yet righteously ego-syntonic affective experience that congealed around a structured pattern of fantasied revenge in which she would con-front her father's assailant and demand his admission of guilt and his apology, along with his acknowledgment that, in her words, “you don't fuck with the Blumenfelds.”
Eventually she goes to Israel, where, using her journalistic cre-dentials and connections, she gains access first to the family of the gunman, by then imprisoned, and later to the man himself. At first Blumenfeld uses only her first name and identifies herself only as an American reporter wishing to learn and write about the Intifada.