Customer Reviews

Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America

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Great insight into life in a refugee camp, paints an incredibly detailed picture. As an American, this book showed me a slice of life I never knew existed. Really shows the incredible spirit of the Palestinian people. While the subject matter overall is serious and sad, the book, while serious, is fascinating and entertaining.

The Israel and Palestine conflict has shattered countless lives. "Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America" is a memoir form Jamal Krayem Kanj, as he reflects on his own journey through the conflict, and how from a refugee camp struggling to survive he found his way to America and made his own way in life. A unique story with a powerful message, "Children of Catastrophe" is a moving and thoughtful read that would do well in any international memoir collection.

I highly recommend this book. Most Americans know nothing about what happened to the Palestinians in 1948, thanks to a highly successful censorship and disinformation process here in the United States. This book shows one small piece of a massive human tragedy that has been completely ignored by Hollywood.

To me, reading memoirs is like reading thick textbooks, and I never read them if I don't have to for school. I picked up Kanji's book with this mindset, expecting to drop it after a few pages. But, the next thing I knew, two hours had passed and I was over halfway through the book. The prose was simple, but powerful. The book was littered with facts yet still intimate. The story itself was violent and somehow also beautiful. I recommend this book, not just to people interested in Middle Eastern politics or culture, but to anyone looking for a powerful story they've never read before.

There aren't that many out there.

The parents of Jamal Kanj, the author, were alongside 800,000 other Palestinians, evacuated from their villages and towns by Israeli terrorist groups, an ethnic cleansing that was supported by the founding Israeli Government and overseen by the former British occupiers of Palestine. One of these terrorist groups, the Haganah, served as the foundation of the now official army of Israel, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).

Jamal wasn't yet born when his family was pursued through the upper Galillee and into Southern Lebanon. He was born a refugee in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp in Lebanon where his family was placed with several thousand other Palestinians. The rights afforded to other Lebanese nationals: the rights for travel and education and self-determinacy were stripped from him and his family. Through no fault of their own, the Palestinians were now exiled from their homeland.

This book describes the life of Jamal. He lives his whole childhood in the square mile refugee camp. What starts off in 1949 as a shelter for Palestinian refugees set up with basic tent facilities, transforms over time to a vibrant town supporting its own community through trade and development. It is also a story of a victim that keeps getting punished. The camp is continuously targeted by Israeli forces in retaliation attacks for crimes committed elsewhere or through acts of aggression aimed at instilling fear in the population, trying to extinguishing any flailing hopes left of them one day returning to their homeland. Jamal leaves the camp at 16 or 17 to study in Baghdad and soon after is accepted to an american university.

Much of the book is interspersed with political events of the time and of historical background. This is the history that wasn't taught to students at school and wasn't taught to me at Jewish school, nor is it taught to Israeli teenagers before they are put into fighter jets and their thumbs hover over the trigger. It is an uncomfortable history. The praised leaders of Israel are quoted here expressing imperialistic sentiment, expressing indiscriminate hate and disregard for the natives of Palestine.

The Lebanese government, especially the Christian-Right ruling party, is also attacked for harassing and limiting the Palestinian refugees. The camp suffered almost total destruction in 2007, a sad situation for the Palestinians who for 2nd or even 3rd time have been forced to leave their home. Out of the ashes comes new hope though. Stated in the last chapter of the book is the slogan for the committees responsible for rebuilding the camp, "We will rebuild Nahr el Bared and we shall return to Palestine". Let us hope for the sake of humanity that they succeed.

Riveting, enthralling, spellbinding, and funny a true description of life in Nahr El Bared Palestinian refugee camp as seen through oral histories and eyes of a survivor.

This book showed me what the U.S Media didn't tell me. It is the book "Night" by Eli Wiesel of the middle east, it revealed the horrible atrocities his people have to go through on a daily basis.