Palestine – Dr JoAnn LoSavio

I can’t stop thinking about this love affair. It’s been months since I finished reading the book, but Allison and Eyal (and Timor, Aisha, Talia, and so many others) continue to occupy my thoughts, not least because the war in Gaza and the horrors that plague Palestine and Palestinians, Israeli and Israelis, remains on-going.

The Lover is a timely novel, as one which revolves around that very political and cultural conflict. But the novel offers a social perspective on how politics hits the ground, how real lives are shaped by the tragedy. The short of it, as I think most people understand, is that the situation is messy. Israelis and Palestinians, Jewish, Arab, each and every one, is woven into a fabric that cannot be unpicked, their threads too tightly interlaced for any one to be extracted without fraying, snapping, leaving a scar in the cloth. The Lover highlights that messiness, the ethical messiness, the material messiness, the psychological and emotional turmoil of Palestine and Israel.

The Lover is a love story, a romance between Allison, a half-Jewish American graduate student who has come to Israel for a semester abroad, and Eyal, a soldier in the Israeli army. To fulfill his military duty, Eyal must conduct missions in Gaza, while Allison frets and waits for his return. But there is another romance here: Allison’s as she becomes enraptured with Israel and the tensions between Jews and Arabs. This is a novel about the ethics of love, what authentic compatibility means, and the difference between passion and compassion between lovers.

What makes The Lover so compelling is that the intertwined romances here force us to confront our own biases in this or other situations. This is a story we cannot turn away from, because even as outsiders watching the news, looking in on the events in Gaza, its messiness forces us to consider what we each might do, might have to do in a similar situation.

The story, as darkly riveting as it is, is not the novels only attraction. The Lover is superbly written. This is literary fiction at its most devastating. Sacks has also clearly done an incredible amount of research, and what might be understood as ethnographic observation; the novel’s environs are so real as to transport the reader to that place, to Israel, to Gaza. The tension Sacks develops through combining research with literature results in a palpable immersion for the reader.

Moreover, Sacks’ characters are fleshy, flawed, and real. Allison is its main protagonist; it is through her voice, her thoughts, that the story is narrated (though she is not its only narrator). Readers cannot help but feel her anxiety, her excitement; as Allison falls deeper in love with Israel, readers may find they are uncomfortably immersed in Allison’s mind. This is a testament to Sacks skill with words.

The Lover is a novel I will likely return to again, perhaps more than once.

Amiry’s choice for the title of her novel, Mother of Strangers, is an homage to the city of Jaffa, the city in which most of the story is set. Indeed, while this is a coming-of-age tale revolving around two young muslims, a 13 year old girl named Shams and a 15 year old boy named Subhi, Mother of Strangers is more accurately a memoir of a lost place and people: Jaffa in the 1940s, before the end of the British Mandate and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war. This novel is a literary memorial to the Palestine and the ethnically-, religiously-mixed community that lived there. (It should be noted that Amiry based the story on real events. There was a real Shams and a real Subhi.)

Through Subhi’s and Sham’s young eyes, the reader is treated to a view of Palestine before it became haunted by politics of religion, zionism, and war, what it it is today. Both of them were on the edge of a modern moment; in some ways eager to tear away from the traditionalism of life as it was lived by their forebears and in other ways, seeking approval and belonging in that world — only to find themselves wrenched away from it violently by invasion and war. This is a serious, heart breaking novel, not to be undertaken lightly. Grief and loss thread through it from its start, beginning with children wanting to assert to their own identities and desires, the shedding of childhood and ending with the actual, fatal loss of children, mothers, family, belongings, and legacies. This is a serious, important novel because it highlights this often-hidden aspect of Palestinian trauma. This novel humanizes a history and experience that is often sterilized in the news.

I couldn’t possibly give this novel any more stars. It is well worth the read and the tears.

Tag: Palestine

The Lover: A Novel by Rebecca Sacks

Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry