I don’t know whether the American author Howard Kaplan likes the song My Way, but from the way he’s lived his life, it fits his story perfectly.
For example, when his debut novel, The Damascus Cover, was published in 1977, it made the LA Times best-seller list, got translated into seven languages, and seemed destined for the cinema. Surprisingly, though, in spite of the spy thriller being a gripping page-turner, full of unexpected twists and rich historical detail, no studio wanted to adapt it. He did get a call from Lionsgate films, however, offering him work.
“They said, ‘We don’t want to do the book. We’d like you to come write for us,’” he tells me from his home in LA. But instead of jumping at the opportunity, the author rebuffed it.
“I made a mistake. I said, ‘Actually, I’m not interested. I’m working on a second book.’ And I never met them. Which was ill-advised. But I was young and I thought everything would be easy from there. And it wasn’t.”
Fast forward four decades and The Damascus Cover has finally made it to the big screen (as Damascus Cover), thanks to a “fluke” encounter between the film’s writer/director, Daniel Zelik Berk, and a woman who happened to know Kaplan, when they were colleagues at LA’s Israeli Consulate.
“He wanted to do a Middle-East film, and thought he could get funding in Israel,” says Kaplan. “He mentioned it to my friend, and she said, ‘Why don’t you read Howard’s book?’”
Howard himself met Berk for coffee, and ended up signing a contract. “I never really read it,” he admits. “I just kind of skimmed it, looked at it briefly, because I never thought it would happen. It just seemed so unlikely.”
Inevitably, changes were made during the journey from page to screen. In the novel, set in the ’70s, Ari Ben-Sion is a middle-aged, burned-out Mossad agent, with a weakness for women born of loneliness and isolation, who is sent to Syria to rescue children from the Jewish ghetto in Damascus. Played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the movie version of Ari is younger and no longer a survivor of Dachau; the year is 1989, to coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the kids have been replaced by a Jewish chemical weapons expert.
Kaplan didn’t write the screenplay but was given access during the editing. He says he’s happy with the outcome. “They’re different, and it’s possible if the film was made closer to the publication of the book I might have felt different. But I’m so happy the film’s made with these high-level people [it features one of John Hurt’s last appearances] and such good acting that it becomes, for me, a different entity.”
When Kaplan wrote the novel, Ari was his way of expressing, in an entertaining way, his own feeling of being “burn out” at 23. By then, he’d already packed a lot into his life, partly in pursuit of finding a way of “trying to break out from a very suffocating family” and its stifling atmosphere of conventional expectation.
His father, who left Poland in 1938 and lost his entire family in the Holocaust, will turn 100 in October, and still tells his son, “You could have been a lawyer.”
Kaplan had other ideas. He studied Middle-Eastern history at Berkeley, travelled around Arab countries including Syria and Lebanon and, during his junior year abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, joined a group quietly set up on campus by Mossad to train potential agents for missions behind the Iron Curtain.
The latter met once a week for a year, and among the things Kaplan learned was that, if captured, he should describe his handlers as someone he really knew, so that he would remain consistent when tired; he chose his father. He was also told that, as he wouldn’t be able to remember everything in Russia, he should fill a fountain pen with milk and use it to make notes in a novel. “Then when you get out, you iron the pages, the milk burns and you can see it.”
After his training, Kaplan was picked from “around a dozen 20/21-year-old kids” for a mission to smuggle a dissident’s manuscript out of Moscow on microfilm, and bring Hebrew texts to underground teachers.
He was sent to London to connect with a group of British Jews —“a lot of them were East Enders at that time who were working informally with the Israeli government” — who helped him get into the Soviet Union.
Kaplan completed the operation successfully but, on his second mission, was arrested by the KGB in Kharkov (now Kharkiv), in the Ukraine, and interrogated for four days, two of them in Moscow.
If he’d been detained for a fifth day, it would have become an international incident, he says, and “I would have been extremely worried.”
To his disappointment, his spying days were over: “I would have kept going every year; I was game to go.” So game, in fact, that he later applied to be a CIA agent. “They didn’t even answer me,” he says, laughing. “Maybe I had a record that I wasn’t clandestine enough for them at that point.”
Influencing everything that Kaplan was doing, up to and including the novel, was the Holocaust. His Hungarian mother had been in Auschwitz when she was 16. Coming so close to the full horror of the Final Solution had made her psychologically weaker than her husband, recalls Kaplan, and she was “a troubled person, very afraid her whole life, very afraid of loss.”
Growing up, he didn’t understand what was happening because his parents, who wouldn’t let him and his sister watch war films on TV, never talked about their experiences. When he was 20, and read Arthur Morse’s book, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, everything started to fall into place — not least how little had been done to help the Jews.
“So it went from teenage frustration with [my mother], that she was such a difficult person, to a sort of eye-opening understanding. And then I think that transition made its way into the writing,” he says.
“I started The Damascus Cover because I wanted to illustrate, through a suspense story that I hoped would have a large market, that there were Jews in Syria — there were, at that point, 5000 in Damascus — and they were being held hostage.”
The drive was similar when he’d done the undercover work: “There I was kind of working through the same thing: what could I do instead of just sit here and yell, ‘The world did nothing!’?”
Not unconnected, the theme of reconciliation runs through Kaplan’s work. It is present in The Damascus Cover novel, and lightly touched on in the movie. He suggests that this isn’t always a concept that comes easily to the children of Holocaust survivors.
“They tend to be frightened of it,” he opines, “because they’re vigilant. They’re vigilant against the rise of Nazism again. They feel, somehow, that they understand it better than other people.”
Kaplan has always tried to reach out to people (he currently tutors young women writers in Gaza, over Skype and Facebook), and suggests that because his father wasn’t beaten down mentally by being in a camp, it helped him to “develop a little of a broader outlook.”
This didn’t stop The Damascus Cover running into difficulties, however. When the book was sold to a publisher in Yugoslavia, Kaplan received a note from the agent saying that the Central Committee of the Communist Party had not only voided the sale but placed the book on the official Eastern European blacklist. History seemed to repeat itself recently when the movie’s Middle East distributor cancelled its contract to release the film. In both cases, Israel appears to have been the issue.
“I don’t really understand this, nor does the director. He said to me, ‘When they bought the film, they knew it was about Israel.’”
Kaplan’s books still haven’t been translated into Arabic, although they have been reviewed by English-language Arab newspapers. Even so, “They’re not known in the Arab world at all,” he says. The film could have been a way to change that — its withdrawal feels like a missed opportunity to introduce people to the work of an author who wants to break down barriers, not build them.
So what are his hopes for the film’s impact?
“I don’t know if it is going to change my life in any way,” says Kaplan, “if I will have a larger footprint around the world. But I’m basically doing the same work. Nothing’s changed in what I’m writing or the way I’m writing.”
After 40 years, he is still doing things his way.
Damascus Cover goes on general release on August 3
