Independently Published The Instrument: A Novel Roman

Jerusalem, 1945. Beirut. Munich. Paris, 1968. Joseph is born into a family already counting its losses. Displaced to Beirut as a child, he grows up between his father's ledger of what was taken and his mother's fading prayers-absorbing both and believing in neither. Precocious, disciplined, and unnervingly still, he finds in Marxist theory the architecture his grief has been missing: an explanation, a mechanism, a blueprint for a world that otherwise makes no sense. Trained as a violinist in Munich and shaped in the basements of Beirut, Joseph arrives in Paris in 1968 already primed for recruitment-a young man who has spent his whole life becoming an instrument, waiting only to be picked up and played. The Instrument follows Joseph from Jerusalem to Beirut to Munich to Paris, tracing the slow, deliberate construction of an operative: the amputation of family, faith, and friendship in favor of a colder, more useful clarity. It is the story of what a person has to give up-and what has to be done to them first-before they can be recruited at all. Companion novel to The Instrument-Maker, which tells the same recruitment from the other side of the table.