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FAMILY AND FABLE IN GALILEE: Review
Christian Arab who speaks and writes Hebrew and considers himself an Israeli. As if this weren't contradiction enough, he grew up in a modest village, rooted in the earth and in local customs, surrounded by fanaticism and superstition and familiar with the pleasures and pains of peasant life an...
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Published in: | The New York times 1988 |
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Main Authors: | , |
Format: | Review |
Language: | English |
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | Get full text |
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Summary: | Christian Arab who speaks and writes Hebrew and considers himself an Israeli. As if this weren't contradiction enough, he grew up in a modest village, rooted in the earth and in local customs, surrounded by fanaticism and superstition and familiar with the pleasures and pains of peasant life and peasant tastes - a situation he renders beautifully in the first part of this book. Yet he is now an accomplished student and speaker of English, a literary editor and television producer, someone who has sojourned in Paris and attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in Iowa City; a writer, moreover, who sets down his Palestinian thoughts in lyrical Hebrew prose and employs with ease and skill the most sophisticated contemporary techniques. By working closely with his translator, [Vivian Eden] (even this name enters the symbolic swirl of the text), he has given us a work in eloquent English to ponder and enjoy. THE book is divided into ''Tale'' and ''Teller,'' two voices that are given alternate, if not equal, opportunities. The Tale concerns itself with origins, with ''who I was,'' and recreates the village life of the author's family, sorting out aunts, uncles, brothers and cousins like clothes to be washed, and evoking the odors of bread and earth, the colors of sky and walls. Like many conquered and crisscrossed countries, the Holy Land is an active producer of orphans and the hunt here for a heritage among doubles and substitutes rivals anything in Dickens, who also specialized in displaced persons. The Teller (who has several points of view but only one voice) returns to the Tale the way Mr. [Anton Shammas] himself returns from Iowa and Paris to the splintered Palestine of his past. The Teller and the Tale are one, an epigraph from John Barth intimates, but the division of the narrative into the Teller's now, and the Tale's then suggests a sundering which the search is attempting to heal. How is the ''what I am'' to be reconciled with ''what I was''? In one sense, this is accomplished by shaking the family tree until the fruit falls; but in another, profounder sense, it is reached simply by rendering, recreating, celebrating ''what is'' and ''what was'' together, like camel and car on the same road. We might call it being faithful to the phenomenological facts. Readers will be reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical Macondo more than once, not only because, for us, this novel's local color is equally exotic, but because the m |
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ISSN: | 0362-4331 |