"Grief feels like love. Sometimes you press on that tender spot, because it’s as close as you can get to the person who is otherwise gone.” – Kate Brody
Posts tagged "Israel"
Knowing who the real monsters are

Knowing who the real monsters are

A crucial juncture in world history was the encounter between the Helleno-Judeo-Christian tradition on the one hand, and the new tenets of Islam on the other. It manifested itself with particularly momentous poignancy on the intellectual plane through a single concept, upon which depended almost everything that mattered: the right to existence itself, cultural, national,...
Love in Ramallah

Love in Ramallah

Unlike most other Palestinian cities, Ramallah is a relatively new town, a de facto capital of the West Bank allowed to thrive after the Oslo Peace Accords, but just as quickly hemmed in and suffocated by the Occupation as the Accords have failed. Perched along the top of a mountainous ridge, it plays host to many contradictions:...
from Revolt Against the Sun

from Revolt Against the Sun

The Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika was one of the most important Arab poets of the twentieth century. A pioneer of free verse poetry, over four decades she transformed the landscape of modern Arabic literature and culture. Revolt Against the Sun, edited, translated and with a comprehensive introduction by Emily Drumsta, presents a selection of al-Mala’ika’s...
Harassment

Harassment

It takes him a few seconds to recognize her. And even then, he isn’t sure she recognizes him. Whether she recognized him earlier from his name or only when he came into the room. Or maybe she’s embarrassed. You can’t tell anything from looking at her. She doesn’t blush. Doesn’t stammer. She continues asking him...
Etgar Keret: Something weird

Etgar Keret: Something weird

Fly Already, Etgar Keret’s first story collection for seven years, hits a familiarly outlandish and infectious groove. The title story relates a potential suicide jump as witnessed by a young boy whose innocent, excited observations to his father are set against a backdrop of grief, guilt, recovery and misunderstanding. It typifies the offbeat humour, childlike...
The future of Palestine

The future of Palestine

It is of more than passing interest that, during the premiership of Herbert Henry Asquith, the British did not seek to acquire Palestine. It was certainly not the government’s priority. Palestine was a land of relative insignificance that could be dealt with once the war was over. Under Asquith, the prevalent official British view was...
The incident

The incident

Over the long days she spent behind the counter, Nofar had developed a habit – she looked into the customers’ faces and tried to guess which of them had come into the ice-cream parlour by accident and which were there by design. The accidental visitors were nicer: people strolling leisurely down the street, sailing along...
A breath of sadness

A breath of sadness

“Like a breath of sadness” is how Edvard Munch felt at the time he painted The Scream. “I stood there shivering from dread – and I felt this big, infinite scream through nature,” he wrote in his diary for 1890­–92. A reader of Larry Tremblay’s The Orange Grove will inevitably feel the same – will...
Over the wall

Over the wall

In 2014 I decided to travel the length of the Green Line, the demarcation line agreed in the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbours. On the other side of the Green Line is the West Bank, which Israel has now occupied for fifty years, ever since the Six-Day War in 1967. I spent...
Michael Chabon: Flying high

Michael Chabon: Flying high

Michael Chabon’s latest novel Moonglow is a fake memoir that spans the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia, rocket science and espionage in World War II Germany, the verve and machinations of the space race and the dwindling of the American Century in a sleepy Florida retirement home. It’s a comical, provocative, jubilant and tender saga...
Elena Lappin: Secrets and lives

Elena Lappin: Secrets and lives

In Elena Lappin’s novel The Nose, her protagonist Natasha Kaplan, a young New Yorker in London editing an Anglo-Jewish magazine, discovers more than she’s bargained for when in the course of her new job she ends up uncovering secrets about her own family’s past. “I thought I had invented and imagined it all,” writes Lappin...
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: The unseen

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: The unseen

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel One Night, Markovitch, published last year, is a funny, sensual and unshakably poetic reimagining of a true-life story in which an unremarkable man agrees an arranged marriage to a beautiful woman, then reneges on his promise of a quick divorce. In her second, Waking Lions, the mood darkens as she examines...