A foot in both camps

As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tugging on his father’s sleeve, he said: ‘Daddy, we have to win this prize.’ Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird’s memoir of growing up in the Middle East, is full of such generosity and innocence.

In 1956, Kai’s father, Eugene Bird, moved his young family from Oregon to East Jerusalem, where he was to serve as American vice-consul in a city divided in two by the 1949 armistice line. Kai grew up in a rented villa half a mile from the lovely old American Colony boarding house in the Arab East — now Tony Blair’s Jerusalem ‘gaff’— and crossed over to the Anglican Mission School in the Israeli West through the barbed-wire and check points of Mandelbaum Gate. Above their house, Kai could hear the roaring of a lion from a Biblical Zoo kept by the Israelis on Mount Scopus.