Review: ‘An American Bride in Kabul’ by Phyllis Chesler

Kate Tuttle reviews ‘An American Bride in Kabul’ by Phyllis Chesler in The Boston Globe

Phyllis Chesler, an American college student, met and fell in love with Abdul-Kareem, an exchange student from Afghanistan. Their courtship was modern, even cosmopolitan — they fancy themselves “film buffs, culture vultures, artists, intellectuals, bohemians” and “talk endlessly about Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Proust.”

Chesler was shocked then, when after their 1961 marriage (an event that left her Orthodox Jewish parents “hysterical and terrified”), the couple moved to his home country and into a compound occupied by Abdul-Kareem’s father and his three wives, along with all their combined offspring.