Dancing Arabs [Paperback]

Sayed Kashua (Author), Miriam Shlesinger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2004

The debut novel by twenty-eight-year-old Arab-Israeli Sayed Kashua has been praised around the world for its honesty, irony, humor, and its uniquely human portrayal of a young man who moves between two societies, becoming a stranger to both. Kashua's nameless antihero has big shoes to fill, having grown up with the myth of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and with a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs brilliantly maps one man's struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kashua resists stereotype in this slyly subversive, semi-autobiographical account of Arab Israeli life, telling the story of a Palestinian boy who wins a prestigious scholarship to a Jewish high school, but slips into listless malaise as an adult, despising himself, scorning his fellow Arabs and resenting the Israelis. The unnamed narrator spends his childhood in the village of Tira. His grandfather was killed in the 1948 war, and his father was jailed for two years before he was married, accused of blowing up a university cafeteria. The narrator doesn't inherit his father's revolutionary tendencies; he's even ignorant of his own history ("In twelfth grade I understood for the first time what '48 was.... Suddenly I understood that Zionism is an ideology. In civics lessons and Jewish history classes, I started to understand that my aunt from Tulkarm is called a refugee, that the Arabs in Israel are called a minority"). When he goes away to the Jewish boarding school, his greatest desire is to fit in, and he bursts into tears the first time he is stopped at a checkpoint. He never finishes college, taking low-level jobs at an institution for the retarded and a bar. When he finally drifts into marriage to an Arab nursing student, he cringes at her dark skin and soon dreams about taking a lover. He can't even find solace in belief, though he fantasizes about becoming a respected teacher of religion. The drab hopelessness of his life is offset by his self-awareness ("I'm a failure anyway") and by Kashua's deadpan, understated humor. Nearly absurdist at moments, this is a chilling, convincing tale.
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From Booklist

After solving a quiz-show riddle, the young Palestinian protagonist earns the rare opportunity to study at a Jewish university in Jerusalem. There is hope for him, so we suspect, and for his village and people. In Jerusalem, though, he feels the truth of his father's pessimism ("once an Arab, always an Arab, and you don't stand a chance") and finds and forfeits forbidden love with Naomi. Yet nationalism, optimism, and his family's hope that his intelligence will lead to the first Arab atom bomb fizzle out and leave a headachy and resentful middle-aged man, unhappily married to an Arab wife back in the borderlands. Translated from the Hebrew, Kashua's debut is as much about family relationships as it is about familiar political challenges, and it is remarkable in illustrating one man's slide into stagnation. Despite its dark prognosis, there is a lightness and dry humor that lifts it with the kind of wings its protagonist once hoped for. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (April 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141269
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141262
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling read!, September 27, 2004

By 

M. T. Guzman "squeakychu" (Rockville, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dancing Arabs (Paperback)

A young boy, growing up in the Arab village of Tira in Israel's Galilee region, describes life within his family and how it feels to be an Arab living in the overwhelmingly Jewish country of Israel. He gains entrance to a Jewish boarding school and finds it difficult to fit in.

I was afraid to begin this story because I didn't want to read a book filled with Arab hatred for Jews. My hope in choosing this book was to get beyond the tragedy of the current political and socioeconomic situation in Israel and truly see an Arab as he lives in Israel. I was soon captured by this young boy's story. It was so interesting and full of such vivid detail that I felt as if I were reading an autobiography rather than a novel, much in the same vein as I felt reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.

The story is sad because it reveals grimmer aspects of Arab-Jewish relations, but it also offers a glimmer of hope (much in the way that the Seeds of Peace did), that an important way to peace is through being open to learn about someone different. The words of this novel are simple, but the emotions behind the narrative are far more complex. In conveying those feelings to his readers, the author does a stunning job. The plight and confusion of a man caught between two cultures is so clearly shown.

In a way, it is a depressing story. Nonetheless, I appreciate the fact that the author has provided this insight into the Israeli-Arab culture for the wider world to share. It shows just how difficult it is for an Arab to find a place as a valued member of the country in which the majority of the population is Jewish, and, once he finds a way to co-exist comfortably among Jews, how he finds that he has alienated himself from his own culture.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comic-gloomy vision . . ., December 7, 2009

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dancing Arabs (Paperback)

This is a well-written, sometimes entertaining, and finally dispiriting book about identity loss. While the international news media may characterize Palestinians as either oppressed or villainous, depending on the political agendas of others, Kashua's portrayal of this novel's Palestinian-Israeli protagonist forgoes the usual stereotypes. His central character is both sympathetic and pathetic by turns.

Carrying a blue identity card, which makes him an Israeli citizen, the novel's narrator tells of his childhood in a village, Tira, which lies north of Tel Aviv, where he learns early a kind of self-contempt that sets him on a path of disillusionment with nearly everything. Given the opportunity to get an education at a Jewish boarding school, which would then open doors into a comfortable professional life, he blames himself for losing the courage to follow that path - though the seeds of his failure had already been planted long ago in his rejection of his ethnicity and his desire to pass for Jewish. Marrying a Muslim girl he meets in Jerusalem, he finds his miseries compounded. Meanwhile, hostilities and tensions mount around him, as wars and rebellion break out again - the Lebanese War, the Gulf War, and the Intafada.

There is dignity left only in clinging to the land, as his aging grandmother has done from the beginning of the novel, refusing to relinquish the patch of it left to her by her dead husband. Given the futility of forging an identity for himself, the narrator can still claim this one consistency in his life, that he has remained devoted to this old woman and is still tenderly caring for her in the closing scene. It permits what has been a comic-gloomy vision to end on a note that is not without a slender thread of hope.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting View of Israel, September 7, 2004

By 

YankeeChick "Yankee" (Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dancing Arabs (Paperback)

I found this book extremely well-written and a good examination of the clash of cultures that occurs for young people growing up in the Palestinian areas of Israel. The book examines the life of an anonymous boy/man throughout his life in short sketches describing events that occur to him. The only problem I had with the book is the main character eventually degenerates into a whiny, unmotivated blob that wishes for great things but never takes the initiative to make them happen. Overall, I would recommend this book.