Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Burleigh Nina
Title : Unholy Business A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land
Year : 2001

Link download : Burleigh_Nina_-_Unholy_Business.zip

CATS OF MANY COLORS prowl the sunken courtyard at the epigrapher’s door on the edge of Jerusalem. At least a dozen of them—tabbies, orange and gray tigers, greeneyed blacks, and piebald whites—slither up and over the garbage bins, sprawl on garden furniture, and purr against my ankles as I press the rusty buzzer and wait. The occupant takes a very long while to answer, as if perhaps the doorbell isn’t working properly. I press it again, and hold it down. Finally a woman pulls the door open, chiding me for being ten minutes late. She has striking pale blue eyes, red lipstick, and dyed black hair pulled back into a 1950s sock-hop-style ponytail. Her gap-toothed smile and sleepy eyes suggest the sultry actress Ellen Barkin, but this woman is in her seventies and no entertainer. She is expert in one of the most arcane fields of scholarship in the world—an epigrapher—analyst of ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician writing from the time of Jesus Christ and before, from the Old Testament era. Museums and collectors worldwide have asked her to compare and decipher inscribed lamps, seals, and pottery for three decades. She is considered one of Israel’s leading authorities on Semitic scripts. Ancient Semitic epigraphy is a rare—but not a lucrative—pursuit, and Ada Yardeni lives modestly in a two-room garden apartment crammed with books, papers, and the collected mementos of a long life. She lives alone; her children are grown and her beloved mother recently died. Right away she apologizes for the condition of her cramped dwelling. “This is my office, and it’s my house. You think it’s nice, but I used to live in Rehavia. But things happen in life.” An air mattress is nestled on the floor behind the dining room table, at the foot of a wall-size bookcase and a small desk. Candles, papers, and yellow plastic flowers in a vase crowd the kitchen table. Walls and surfaces are decorated in a motley style—kitten pictures, posters of Errol Flynn, snapshots of children and grandchildren, and two large, dramatic canvases of a younger Ada in a summer hat, with the desert in the background. Ada’s daughter painted them in a modern style that seems lifted straight from David Hockney’s bright realism. Bookshelves bend under fat tomes in Hebrew and English such as Textbook of Aramaic Hebrew and Nabatean and Documentary Texts from the Judaean Desert. The books she herself has written are never less than three inches thick, and include Book of Hebrew Script and Textbook of Aramaic and Hebrew Documentary Texts from the Judaean Desert. Ancient language and literature was the family vocation. Ada’s father, Menachem Zulei, born in Galicia (now Poland) emigrated to Israel and spent his entire life bushwhacking through a massive trove of Hebrew liturgical writing, called a geniza, found in a Cairo synagogue—two hundred thousand books and manuscripts in all, dating from 1000 CE to the nineteenth century. Ada was born in Jerusalem and married young, but she was widowed at age twenty-eight. ...