Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (Hardcover)

by Ibtisam Barakat (Author) "Like a bird clawing The bars of a cage And wishing them branches, My fingers grasp The bus rails before me..." (more)
Key Phrases: postal box, Dar El-Tiff, Nabi Samuel, Abu Qazem (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 7 Up–This moving memoir of a Palestinian woman's childhood experiences during the Six-Day War and its aftermath is presented in beautifully crafted vignettes. Barakat, now living and working in the United States, frames the story of her life between 1967 and 1970 with a pair of letters from herself as a high school student in 1981. Detained by soldiers during an ordinary bus trip, she was prompted to try to recall her shattered childhood and share her experiences with others around the world. She begins with a description of her three-year-old self, temporarily separated from her family in their first frantic flight from their Ramallah home as the war began. The author's love for the countryside and her culture shines through her bittersweet recollections. Careful choice of episodes and details brings to life a Palestinian world that may be unfamiliar to American readers, but which they will come to know and appreciate. Readers will be charmed by the writer-to-be as she falls in love with chalk, the Arabic alphabet, and the first-grade teacher who recognizes her abilities.–Kathleen Isaacs, Towson University, MD
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* In a spare, eloquent memoir, Barakat recalls life under military occupation. In 1981 the author, then in high school, boarded a bus bound for Ramallah. The bus was detained by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint on the West Bank, and she was taken to a detention center before being released. The episode triggers sometimes heart-wrenching memories of herself as a young child, at the start of the 1967 Six Days' War, as Israeli soldiers conducted raids, their planes bombed her home, and she fled with her family across the border to Jordan. She also recalls living under occupation and the thrill of being able to attend the United Nations school for refugees. The political upheaval is always in the background, but for young Barakat, much of the drama was in incidents that took place in everyday life.^B What makes the memoir so compelling is the immediacy of the child's viewpoint, which depicts both conflict and daily life without exploitation or sentimentality. An annotated bibliography will help readers fill in the facts. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR); 1ST edition (February 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374357331
• ISBN-13: 978-0374357337
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #175,797 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Picking up the pieces, November 28, 2007

By	E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There aren't many books on the Palestinian situation available for children, and fewer still that are memoirs. I actually managed to pick up and read Ibtisam Barakat's, "Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood," without ever realized that it was more than mere historical fiction. As a bilingual author and poet, Ms. Barakat could have written a straight up autobiography, but somehow the memoir is just as moving and intense a portrait as anyone could ask for. It gives her struggles a weight, balance, and arc that wouldn't necessarily belong in a standard series of personal facts. Tracing her life from just before the Six-Day War when she was three to her state as a teenager, Ibtisam remembers her struggles in an occupied Palestine and draws strength from her past.

Facts guide Ms. Barakat's pen, and the horrors of the Six-Day War speak louder than anything else. If dehumanizing occupation is inherently political, then yes, there are politics in this book. More than anything, though, I was struck by Ms. Barakat's ability to write without pointing fingers or blame. Her primary goal is to attain peace in the land of her birth. Mentions of things like bulldozers are only brought up in the beginning. In the past, Barakat will show small beautiful things, like a fig tree with a single early ripe fruit on it. There is no mention of what might happen to that tree in the future.

The prose itself is pretty good too. An Israeli soldier butchering his Arabic pronunciations makes, "the words sound like they have been beaten up, bruised so blue they can hardly speak their meaning." When shouting down a well she says, "We called out one another's names; the echoes returned to us as though our voices had grown older than we were." I liked that the teenaged Ibtisam felt so claustrophobic under her mother's attentions that she wrote, "Mothers and soldiers are enemies of freedom. I am doubly occupied." You learn things too. At one point we learn that the Arabic word for "imagine" is "batkhayyal" which means, "to see the shadow of a thought."

Of course, you want to know more. If we understand that this book is a fictionalization of Ms. Barakat's own life then we want to understand how she came to be a resident of Columbia, Missouri after a childhood as a refugee. The answer to this lies in two parts. In a final note in the book that reads "Giving Back to the World" she writes, "Without the help of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency ... millions of other children and I would not have gone to school or learned to read, write, and use our pencils to clear a tiny path through the wreckage of refugee life..." Later in the backflap of the book we learn too that the author, "grew up in Ramallah and has a degree in English literature from Birzeit University in the West Bank. She came to the United States in 1986 for an internship at The Nation magazine." Considering the number of starred professional reviews (at least three as of this review) "Tasting the Sky" has received already, not to mention its inclusion more than a few Best Books of 2007 lists, Ms. Barakat might wish to consider penning a sequel to her story. Perhaps one that follows her heroine through her tricky years of a teen. Such a novel might make for a lovely companion to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, if nothing else.

Given the subject matter, I was intrigued by the suggested reading list at the back of the book. Barakat deals with some difficult issues, and I wanted to know which children and teen books she felt would best complement her own take on the conflict. The list consists of seven selections, both books and films, each one discussing the nature of peace and how to attain it. Each one also gives voice to the Palestinians living in the region, most also offering an Israeli perspective as well.

For many kids, the conflict in Palestine is a difficult topic to grasp. That probably goes for teens and adults as well, I'd wager. What Barakat's book offers is a modest introduction to the history behind some of the troubles via her own personal history. People who would like to include this in a unit for teenagers could consider pairing it with Joe Sacco's graphic novel Palestine for a more recent look at the problem. We may or may not see an answer to the hostilities in an occupied Palestine in our lifetimes, but at the very least we can know that there are voices out there like Ibtisam Barakat who are striving for a peaceful solution. As she says at the beginning, "Many countries have an intense involvement with the Israelis and Palestinians. But the approach of siding with one group or the other, caring about only one rather than both, seems to add to the strife." Let's hope she has more stories in her to tell.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant Memoir, April 17, 2007

By	James Shreckengost (Decatur, GA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ibtisam Barakat's "Tasting the Sky," is written with both a backward glance toward lost innocence, and an eye toward the future, as she offers her hope, extended without reservation, for a just and lasting peace for all people in Palestine/Israel. Her words describe what she saw with her eyes and felt with her skin as her childhood erupted in the violence of war. Despite the shattering of any remaining innocence by being hauled into a detention center during her high school years, Ibtisam responds without malice or hatred. She became determined to succeed in obtaining her education, and she has triumphed with her bittersweet memoir. She has somehow recaptured the elusive innocence of her youth , nurturing her memories, fond and stark alike, into letters, (like alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet) and then forming the letters into words that are coaxed onto the page. Barakat's yearning to tell her story was formed at a very young age and has become a reality in "Tasting the Sky," despite all the obstacles and hardships she faced growing up under illegal military occupation. Her memories are rather like the wild, red poppies that push their way up through the thin, rocky soil of the olive groves in the hills surrounding Ramallah....they are beautiful and delicate, with odds against their surivival, yet they are indomitable! Having recently journeyed to Ramallah and surrounding villages, the images conveyed in Barakat's gently-woven tapestry of language were all the more vivid and compelling. What a pleasure to read it and to see hope and future possibilities for her homeland through the author's eyes.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Through this tale of a Palestinian childhood we come to know the world, and ourselves, March 12, 2007

By	Ann Sieber (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood" is splendid. Like Annie Dillard's "An American Childhood," the writer travels back to that vantage point of childhood that we all are hungry to remember. The young girl in "Tasting the Sky" has a quiet eye that takes in the world with poetic intensity. And although she starts her story with a wrenching episode of abandonment, this girlchild of war does not react with despair or hate. Instead, like children everywhere, she finds fountains of strength in the tiniest of corners, in the friendship with a goat, even by making an imaginary friend of a piece of chalk. Like this piece of chalk, this little girl is so short and easy to overlook. And, like the piece of chalk, she can be huge as she seeks to create and save a world through her writing, so beautifully employed in the service of memory, healing and peace.