Publication date:
06 November 2014Length of book:
220 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442235373
Madame Ambassador is an intimate description of what being an ambassador is really like. Tova Herzl draws on her twenty-one year career and shares her unique experiences as a single, Jewish orthodox woman serving as Israel’s Ambassador to paint a vivid, entertaining picture of the lives and work of contemporary diplomats. She addresses major political events in which she was closely involved, such as the 2001 UN Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, and discusses ethical and private issues, such as dealing with illness or practicing her religion. The book also uncovers the personal side of diplomacy, including the challenges of giving speeches and interviews, access to expense accounts and household staff, relations within the diplomatic corps, and life under the watchful eye of a bodyguard.
Herzl, a career diplomat who entered the diplomatic corps at the age of 30, worked for the Foreign Service from 1983 to 2003. These years marked a period of frenetic change the world over, but especially in the countries in which she served as ambassador – the Baltic States (from 1993 to 1996) and South Africa (from 2001 to 2003). Given all she saw and experienced in her two-decade-long career, there is a lot to reminisce about, and the book flits back and forth between Herzl’s postings – which also included two tours of duty as a congressional liaison in Washington. The book is formatted as a subject- based rather than a chronological look back at her time abroad and among the many and varied topics, Herzl touches on the importance of language (the complicated issue of whether to speak Russian in former Soviet states), what an ambassador actually does, and the Holocaust (an inevitable subject in the Baltics). . . .Of course, diplomatic life is full of propriety and protocol, and understanding just how the rules work and with whom you can and should fraternize is not always easy. To give some insight into just how the complicated system works, Herzl outlines the minutiae of diplomatic life, how relationships work, whom you visit and how you address them, even when the person standing opposite you is clad just in animal skins and feathers – as was the case when she presented her credentials to the king of Swaziland. It is vignettes such as these...that make the book so enjoyable and readable. As she states in the introduction, the book is an attempt to write a personal, yet general, informative and entertaining work that would demystify diplomacy. Herzl easily jumps between the political and personal, the absurd and the weighty, and in so doing has certainly made the diplomatic life a little less foreign.