It is a story of love and pain: love of the little girl Amal for her father in the early mornings on the roof of their house in the Palestine village of Ein Hod, cuddled up to him listening to his voice reading poems, smelling his pipe and watching the sun rise, love between the adolescent friends who spend any free minute together exchanging secrets, love between brother and sister, love evoked by smells of plants, blossoms fruits, the sun-baked earth and spices rising from shared dishes, the hot earth and stones under bare feet, blossoming love between woman and man, mother and newborn, …, love pierced by bullets, torn apart by bombs, scarred, imprisoned, surrounded by watchtowers, forbidden paths blocked by guards becoming unreachable dreams resolved only in death. „A story of one family in an obscure village, visited one day by a history that was not its own, and forever trapped by longing between roots and soil. A tale of war, its chilling, burning, and chilling-again fire. […] Of grown children sifting through the madness to find their relevance. Of a truth that pushed its way through lies, emerging from a crack, a scar, in a man’s face.“ (285)

The tale is narrated in different voices, Palestinian mainly but also Ali, a jewish immigrant, whose family fled from Nazi-Germany. Hasan, father of Amal, and Ali had met as boys in 1937 in Jerusalem and became friends: „Thus [reading, sharing a tomato] a friendship had been born in the shadow of Nazism in Europe and in the growing divide between Arab and Jew at home, and it had been consolidated in the innocence of their twelve years, the poetic solitude of books, and their disinterest in politics.“ (9)
Would such friendship be possible after the 1948 Nakba or any time after? today? perhaps between Arab and Israeli members of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra?

And: „Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust.“ (273) Will this deadly conflict ever be resolved? It does not look like it with an Israeli government of the extreme Right in power, their policy of annexation of the occupied West Bank through ever more illegal Jewish settlements. A two-state solution is long dead. Israel today is an apartheid-state, practically keeping the Palestinian population imprisoned.

I did not take to the language of the first part of the book; towards the end the language much improves in my view - the quotations above give a hint of this. This should not put you off reading and discussing the many questions raised. Helpful suggestions how to begin are given at the end of the book. (I-23) 3+1/2 * ( )

Bellissimo e indimenticabile.
Leggere questo libro è stata un'esperienza incredibile sotto tutti i punti di vista e mi ha colpito nel profondo come non avrei mai pensato possibile.
È il racconto delle vicissitudini di quattro generazioni di una famiglia araba, gli Abulheja, narrate a partire dal 1948 in parallelo alla vera storia della Palestina, dal momento in cui verranno costretti con la forza ad abbandonare la loro casa ad ‘Ain Hod per essere trasferiti nel campo profughi di Jenin.
Un racconto duro e straziante ma al tempo stesso dolce, tenero e nostalgico, scevro comunque da qualsiasi acrimonia e recriminazione ma che ti fa entrare a viva forza in una realtà terribile e difficilissima, finora solo immaginata, ma che adesso queste parole hanno invece reso quasi tangibile.
Ci sono pagine che non potrò dimenticare, che ho letto con difficoltà perché la commozione e quello che sentivo mi impedivano di andare avanti, ci sono immagini che si sono create nella mia mente che non si cancelleranno, ci sono parole e frasi lette che risveglieranno ricordi e c'è la convinzione che quello che viene narrato è la realtà di quanto è successo. E poi ci sono le mille domanda che sorgono spontanee durante la lettura, una su tutte continua rigirare nella mia testa: ma com’è possibile che persone che hanno subito l’infamia dell’Olocausto possano dimenticare così in fretta quello che hanno subito e passare senza alcuna remora dal ruolo di vittime a quello di torturatori? La mente umana è così facile a dimenticare le sofferenze pur di raggiungere un fine, peraltro, in questo caso, alquanto discutibile nella sua legittimità?
Un libro che, oserei dire, andrebbe letto obbligatoriamente anche solo per farci capire quanto grande è la fortuna di nascere in un posto piuttosto che in un altro. ( )

A rarely told Palestinian story (though perhaps more of their stories have been told since this was written). Heartbreaking on two levels especially, what these people experienced, and that they experienced it at the hands of people who one would hope and wish had kept bloodless hands. There is no denial in this novel that the Palestinians have blood on their hands too.

Abulhawa witnessed some of these events, and witnessed the denial of them by the UN and others. Knowing there would be denial of the contents of her novel, she quoted from the works of respected historians in a few areas. But this is a novel, a story of one family and their neighbours and friends.

It wrung my heart at the end when one young Palestinian is given a visa to study in the US, and writes home to say that he can't believe what life is like living somewhere there is no war. At the current time, we too should be remembering this. But then there is always war somewhere, and many of those wars go unacknowledged by those of us in safety. ( )

I feel like a stupid American. A really stupid American. Of course I've been aware of the Arab/Israeli conflict for decades but this gut wrenching book brought so much to the forefront, in graphic, horrifying detail that just tore my heart out. Read for Paul's Middle East Challenge, this book has been sitting on my shelf since 2011 and I'm so glad I finally read it because it was eye opening and even though it is fiction, the author had so many sources to verify the facts she presented in the book.

Forced to live their lives in a refugee camp in Jenin after continual bombing and attacks, not for months but for years and years after their land and home were taken from them, Amal and her family and friends suffer in numerous and terrible ways. Heartbreaking, and relevant to this day. ( )

The message and themes in this book sometimes overshadowed the narrative, but there is no denying that it is a powerful and tragic story ( )