Customer Reviews

Dancing Arabs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

. . . and have fun with this novel. Wisely, the author--himself a young man--begins the novel with the tender relationship between a boy and his grandmother. These typical scenes are about as universal as any can get. As the boy grows older, everything about being an Arab citizen of Israel may seem unusual to the reader. The novel is often comical, but gets intense when the boy is sent to a Jewish school. The setting seems to be the late 1970s to `80s; the author indicates the time frame with sentences like, "Shadia was the first Arab girl I'd met who knew about Tom Waits" (174). Throughout the novel, what's obvious is how Jewish people and Arabs shape each other's identity. There are details and scenes that no one living outside Israel/Palestine could possibly have invented.

The sentences of this novel are short and to the point as though the narrator is telegraphing an urgent call for help. The novel is written in the first person, and has the casual tone of someone talking, telling a story--almost interior monologue. While the main character does "talk" about wanting to be Jewish, I don't think the book cover summary is right; the main character doesn't "fake" his identity nor is he a "coward." The author of _Dancing Arabs_, Sayed Kashua, shows what conflicts shape a young Palestinian man with Israeli citizenship, as he becomes aware that he must construct himself out of various historic conflicts (the worst of them suffered by his parents and grandparents when Palestine was partitioned as Israel). He has great hope for his life, and his family, but is always on the edge of a kind of "cracking up."

This novel is organic--inseparably art and politics. This novel and others like it are the real news behind the network TV "news." The world needs more such literary truth to educate us.

There is something poignant and painful about Sayed Kashua's excellent book, "Dancing Arabs." This short novel/fictional autobiography of a young Palestinian Israeli, who has lived in both of the two strongly competing cultures of Israel--Arab and Jewish--pulls no punches when it comes to presenting the day-to-day dilemmas faced by the flawed anti-hero of the story. There is no personal reconciliation and comfort for him, and we see him for the most part as a grossly self-centered and self-absorbed social misfit. Author Kashua makes it clear how the character's daily tightrope act has shaped his character and behavior, but understanding those factors makes it only a shade easier to be at all sympathetic to his situation.

Growing up as a Palestinian child in a household embittered by the Palestinian and Arab defeats in 1948 and subsequent conflicts with the Israelis, where ancestral lands and homes were lost and forceable relocation was the norm, the novel's unnamed main character is nonetheless pushed by his parents toward the educational opportunities that only the Israeli state can provide. By dint of his intelligence and with some luck, he is sent to an Israeli boarding school where he quickly learns that he belongs to a lower rung of Israeli society but is still greatly privileged compared to others in the Arab community that he comes from. He gradually becomes more Israeli in his behavior and outlook and increasingly shuns contact with his family and other Arabs although he is fully aware that he is irrevocably tied to that community and that he will never be fully accepted socially by Jewish Israelis.

This short story takes him through his student years when he enjoyed a limited kind of special status and a comfortable alienation from his roots and then into a difficult return to the Arab community through an early marriage to a Palestinian woman after rejection by the family of his Jewish girlfriend's family.

"Dancing Arabs" is an insightful look into the complexities of living in a society divided by sectarianism and historic resentments. It is not without some hope as it takes its anti-hero to a certain level of maturity through fatherhood and coming to terms with the responsibilities of being a husband. But this very much a "warts and all" story that is purposely left without a definitive ending.

Good writing and well-worth the reading time.

I really enjoyed this quick read. Engrossing honest depiction of life for Arabs in Israel- not what you would expect.

Gives a clear picture of life and the world of an Arab in Israel. It's nicely written, easy to read, and makes the reader think. It also gives a good picture of a boy growing up, going through the issues of every day life, dealing with failure, school, money, friends and family, etc.

In the end his father said after he had returned from Egypt, that it would be the best when an Israeli-Arab would become a seventh class citizen in a Zionistic state. That would be better than being a first class citizen in an Arab state. "My father hates the Arabs, he says, it is better to be a slave of an enemy than to be slave of a leader from the own people".
And this of a father, who regarded himself a life long as a militant Palestinian Arab who had no love lost between him and the Jews! Fiction? If you read the book from beginning to the end, you will not believe this. It seems to be autobiographic and authentic. Many details from the daily life of an Arab in Israel are very precise. If they were wrong they would call for contradiction.
The author never takes sides, neither for the one nor for the other side. It is possible to find a lot of ironic and self-ironic, besides there is a lot of ugly and banal, more apparent is the senseless and contradictory in the hatred and behaviour of the Arabs. Perhaps the author did have the intention to set a big question mark behind it?
The Palestinians live on hope and many expectations which all seem to be irrational. The end of the Jews must be very near. The prophet returns, Jerusalem will fall tomorrow, the Arabs of all countries unify... at first place is the extermination or forced displacement of the Jews. And if this will not succeed, at least the conditions in the country should change. Then Jews have to be the citizens of second class, finally only Arabs are orthodox!
But, in the Arab states the Arabs have no better life than in Israel. Economically rather the opposite. The Jews despising "father" is building his fourth house and hopes that his son will one day construct the first Arabian atomic bomb!
The story-teller does not know himself really where he is standing. He is pragmatic, he likes when Jews regard him as a Jew. This means advantages. He dresses like a Jew, speaks like a Jew which even makes him proud! The Jews have clean water, they have teachers who do not beat and they have work. And of course he has a Jewish lover! The Arab wife hates him. Facing all the striking homemade problems on the side of the Muslims he is not able to take their party. Education has not inherited defect on him, the propaganda had not blinded him rather deterred!
If the author wanted to write an impartial book, he made it, even if he is nowhere political. Maybe that exactly is the special, to make something clear without uttering?
Many anecdotes seem to be strung together without rhyme or reason, but altogether they form a picture. The hair must stand on end about the naivete, nonage, blockheadedness and aggressive potency of the dancing Arabs.
The book is intelligible written and an easy read. For some it is perhaps a better introduction in the life of the "zone" than a journalists discourse. But one thing is for sure, Muslims will not like it. What may not be true, cannot be true!

Not knowing much about the Arab war, I felt a bit lost in between the spotty chapters, which could easily be read as diary entries of an Arab voice, a boy coming of age at a time of uncertainty. The structure of the book adds to the personality, development and characterization of storyteller... brief, honest, private, and vulnerable. Some of the words were left in the original language, giving the story a taste of authenticy, but also leaving me, the reader, hanging, knowing that i am missing the entire meaning of the word, sentence, feeling. The person we come to know is one who lives in constant confusion, through distorted memories, and also complacency. He seems to live life on the other side of a window, never fully grasping onto opportunities and allowing quality to slip away. He seems to watch his life move along each day without taking ownership of his life. The book comes to an end without satisfying the reader w/ any glimpse of hope; instead, the storyteller never overcomes his fears and does nothing proactively to change himself for the better. Though I personally felt unfulfilled and somewhat disappointed in the main dude, I was reminded that I know people just like him in my culture, my society, my community. His challenges and fears are just as prevalent as in my life... but he does not take action. I guess in the end, he is just as much human as I am.