Book Review

Phyllis Chesler, An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.  viii + 235 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms (Hamilton, New Zealand)

This is more than the story of Phyllis Chesler’s exotic and dangerous adventures and entrapment in Afghanistan as a young intelligent but naïve young woman—although that is most interesting in itself and pertinent today where the nature of Muslim and other Middle Eastern nations’ treatment of women is a point in need of world attention.  But it is also the narrative of how she came to be in such a precarious position in the first place, how the episode transformed her life, and what the implications are for her ideological view of women’s issues, the world-wide vilification of Jews and Israel, and the way in which western liberal thinkers constantly delude themselves into believing the myths of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.

In the first section of the book, focused on her entry into Afghanistan as the American-Jewish wife who is a burden and pain to her new family and the details of her capture and her realization of how the man she had met and fallen in love with in university has betrayed her trust, the author tells a gripping tale—one that makes the reader (at least the western audience) cringe with horror at her treatment.  But the text is more than an adventure story, a drama or an epic of imprisonment and escape.  Almost effortlessly, Chesler weaves together these various and complex strands of tale-telling and self-analysis.  She re-reads her diaries of the time, comments on them from a more mature perspective, compares herself and her situation to other female travellers to the region over the past century, and wondered how she could have been so naïve, so unprepared for what was to come.  The book is thus a tissue of different times and perspectives, the transcriptions of the diary she kept during her period of entrapment (imprisonment, purdah), similar reports of other women travellers and wives of Arab or Muslim men, retrospection in the early years of her return to America, polemical and confessional accounts by contemporary women who have escaped to the west or have come to new consciousness when in Europe or America and reveal the debilities of their youth and their fellow Islamic female friends, the development of her feminist ideas and her shock at discovering how increasingly modern feminists refuse to understand the horrors of Third World repression of not just feminism itself or liberal values but of basic western civilized rights long fought for , and the current meditations on her experiences seen from the distance of more than fifty years.  Phyllis is now remarkably tolerant and patient with her former husband and even of many of her former relatives from Kabul.  But there is no doubt she has learned from this youthful error, this adventure, what so few westerners understand: both what it means to be a westerner—specifically an American Jew and an educated liberated woman—and what it feels like to be a female in the East, to be a prisoner in purdah, to have her very identity as a person belittled and mocked and made vulnerable. 

In Section 2, finally managing to obtain an Afghan passport to replace the confiscated US document, Chesler returns to America, leaving behind not only fear, repression and violence, but also her naïveté.  It is the early 1960s.  She is not yet a feminist. The Civil Rights movement has not begun, there is also no anti-Vietnam War agitation.  No one understands what she has experienced.  Her Orthodox family nevertheless help her, she goes back to finish her university degree, and she becomes a psychologist.  After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, her former husband—she finally succeeded in obtaining an annulment visits her in America, where she interviews him.  Between the time of her escape and his arrival she had been studying Afghan history and was beginning to understand how dangerous her situation had been.  He tells her things about the society he had brought her to, but had which he never explained, perhaps because he himself did not realize what it was and the hold it had over him.  Again, the textures of the book are complex and thick, her perceptions from the moment and from many later vantage points; her own words and the passages he cites or paraphrases from historical books, people she subsequently came to know, and imaginative explanations of all she has become because of the adventure as a captive bride.

Back in America, Phyllis studies more and more about Afghanistan and the various nations of Islam.  She is free to read what she wants, meet anyone and to say things that people, and especially not women can say under Islam.  She studies the history of Jews in the country where she was captured and their history throughout Arab and Muslim lands.  She learns the hard way what her friends and colleagues in the feminist movement come increasingly to deny: the harshness and danger of Islamic attitudes towards women, and their deep vitriolic hatred of western civilization because it has fought so long and hard to free itself from most, certainly not all, its negativity about women’s rights.  She comes back to Judaism, as she reaches a new respect for America and what the West stands for, a gritty realism based on realistic, pragmatic understanding of the world as it really is.  In the course of revealing her own experiences—and for the first time, how she converted to Islam while in purdah to try to soften the onerous conditions of her life—she puts together the various historical works, traveller’s tales and conversations with people she meets in order to frame a powerful, frightening picture of how dangerous is the Islamicist threat to the West in general as well as to Israel.  These discussions are worth reading the whole book, even as, to be sure, it is more than a mere diary of events she lived through—it is a persuasive, vivid account of what is at stake for all of us.  In many ways, it is beautifully written, poetic in depth, and epic in scope. On almost every page it challenges easy, superficial thinking, it challenges all the assumptions we have grown up with, it forces us to reassess who we are, where we live, and what stands a horrible likelihood if we do not heed its clear messages.  Another key thread is her relationship to her first husband, Abdul-Kereem.  Amazingly, unbelievably, she remains in contact with him his second wife, the children of that second marriage, and remains deeply attached to him emotionally, while at the same time seeing him for what he is and was and what might have been.  It is this tension-ridden romance of more than fifty years duration  that gives to the whole book a drive and a power that makes it virtually a novel.