I've written a longer review for the blog Mondoweiss, but I'll try to summarize here. I'll admit, I started reading this novel with a bit of trepidation. A Jewish-American woman writing a historical novel from the perspective of a young Palestinian...
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I've written a longer review for the blog Mondoweiss, but I'll try to summarize here.
I'll admit, I started reading this novel with a bit of trepidation. A Jewish-American woman writing a historical novel from the perspective of a young Palestinian man requires serious chutzpah.
Thankfully, what I found was an engaging novel with an impressive degree of empathy and authenticity. It reads like a combination of Mornings in Jenin and The Kite Runner. As such, it has the potential to reach broad audiences with a powerful message of Palestinian humanity that's sadly missing from the popular consciousness.
According to interviews with the author (who spent seven years in Israel and was horrified as she began learning the truth about the Palestinian situation), the seed for the idea of the book began with a friend she met at Harvard, a Palestinian with an Israeli PhD advisor whose father spent many years in prison. Despite the harshness of his childhood (he was forced early into being the breadwinner because of his father's imprisonment), he showed an aptitude for math and science that allowed him to attend Israeli and later American universities. Ichmad's life follows this basic narrative, though it's set a couple of decades earlier.
She acknowledges this is a rare occurrence, and the question of how Ichmad's success causes him to become out of touch with his fellow Palestinians is sensitively addressed. The book does not take a fantasist approach that the conflict will be easy to solve if we can just hold hands and sing kumbaya. Still, it shows what's possible when love of science (or humanity, music, or anything else) transcends love of your own particular ethnically-based privilege. Minds can open, and old wounds can begin to heal. (One is invited to imagine how much more so once some measure of justice is finally done.)
Israelis are not demonized in the book, and this is critical both because it rings authentic (Israelis, after all, are not demons but human beings in a particular human context) and because it allows the possibility of reaching genuinely broad audiences.
The book is epic in scope, beginning shortly after 1948 when Ichmad's Palestinian family finds themselves becoming "Arab-Israelis" with no rights to their own land, and continuing almost to the present day.
There is no shortage of tragedies along the way, and readers with weak stomachs may have to put the book down occasionally before continuing on. But there are also moments of pure joy and humor and beauty, of taking stock and realizing that despite what has been lost, so much does still exist, with so much potential.
As the book says: "You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending."
I've written a longer review for the blog Mondoweiss, but I'll try to summarize here.
I'll admit, I started reading this novel with a bit of trepidation. A Jewish-American woman writing a historical novel from the perspective of a young Palestinian man requires serious chutzpah.
Thankfully, what I found was an engaging novel with an impressive degree of empathy and authenticity. It reads like a combination of Mornings in Jenin and The Kite Runner. As such, it has the potential to reach broad audiences with a powerful message of Palestinian humanity that's sadly missing from the popular consciousness.
According to interviews with the author (who spent seven years in Israel and was horrified as she began learning the truth about the Palestinian situation), the seed for the idea of the book began with a friend she met at Harvard, a Palestinian with an Israeli PhD advisor whose father spent many years in prison. Despite the harshness of his childhood (he was forced early into being the breadwinner because of his father's imprisonment), he showed an aptitude for math and science that allowed him to attend Israeli and later American universities. Ichmad's life follows this basic narrative, though it's set a couple of decades earlier.
She acknowledges this is a rare occurrence, and the question of how Ichmad's success causes him to become out of touch with his fellow Palestinians is sensitively addressed. The book does not take a fantasist approach that the conflict will be easy to solve if we can just hold hands and sing kumbaya. Still, it shows what's possible when love of science (or humanity, music, or anything else) transcends love of your own particular ethnically-based privilege. Minds can open, and old wounds can begin to heal. (One is invited to imagine how much more so once some measure of justice is finally done.)
Israelis are not demonized in the book, and this is critical both because it rings authentic (Israelis, after all, are not demons but human beings in a particular human context) and because it allows the possibility of reaching genuinely broad audiences.
The book is epic in scope, beginning shortly after 1948 when Ichmad's Palestinian family finds themselves becoming "Arab-Israelis" with no rights to their own land, and continuing almost to the present day.
There is no shortage of tragedies along the way, and readers with weak stomachs may have to put the book down occasionally before continuing on. But there are also moments of pure joy and humor and beauty, of taking stock and realizing that despite what has been lost, so much does still exist, with so much potential.
As the book says: "You cannot go back and make a new start, but you can start now and make a new ending."
