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ridgewaygirl's review against another edition
5.0
During the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israel War, the residents of the city of Lydda (now Lod) were forced to leave their homes. Later, those homes would house Jewish refugees, themselves displaced from their homes in Bulgaria. But a few Arabs, Muslim and Christian, stayed behind in Lydda and were gathered together into what the soldiers guarding them called a ghetto. Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury and translated by Humphrey Davies, tells the story of one boy, the first child born into this new version of Lydda.
The novel begins with a long introduction from a university professor in New York named Elias Khoury, who met Adam briefly and disliked him intensely, mostly because they shared a romantic interest in the same woman but also out of consternation. Adam Dannoun is the cook in a falafel restaurant, well-educated and well-spoken, but he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew like a native. When Adam dies, the woman brings a stack of notebooks to Elias. She had been instructed by Adam's will to destroy them, but finds herself unable to do so. Elias, upon reading the notebooks, initially wants to write a novel based on the contents, but decides instead to submit them as they are for publication.
What follows begins as what one might find in the private notebooks of a scholar, a series of abortive attempts at writing the story of a Yemeni poet during the time of the Caliphates, followed by a rambling entry about his life in general, but all of this is necessary to the meat of the novel, Khoury taking his time to set up ideas and the life of this first witness before leading into what life was like for the people who stayed behind in Lydda, after most of the people had fled.
This was a powerful and understated novel about a part of the world whose history I know too little about. Khoury's slow and meandering style was wonderful and I'll be reading more by this author.
The novel begins with a long introduction from a university professor in New York named Elias Khoury, who met Adam briefly and disliked him intensely, mostly because they shared a romantic interest in the same woman but also out of consternation. Adam Dannoun is the cook in a falafel restaurant, well-educated and well-spoken, but he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew like a native. When Adam dies, the woman brings a stack of notebooks to Elias. She had been instructed by Adam's will to destroy them, but finds herself unable to do so. Elias, upon reading the notebooks, initially wants to write a novel based on the contents, but decides instead to submit them as they are for publication.
What follows begins as what one might find in the private notebooks of a scholar, a series of abortive attempts at writing the story of a Yemeni poet during the time of the Caliphates, followed by a rambling entry about his life in general, but all of this is necessary to the meat of the novel, Khoury taking his time to set up ideas and the life of this first witness before leading into what life was like for the people who stayed behind in Lydda, after most of the people had fled.
This was a powerful and understated novel about a part of the world whose history I know too little about. Khoury's slow and meandering style was wonderful and I'll be reading more by this author.
arirang's review against another edition
3.0
The reader will notice that these notebooks contain texts that are incomplete, a mating of novel and autobiography, of reality and fiction, and a blending of literary criticism with literature. I don’t know how to categorise the text, in terms of either form or content : it mixes writing with outlining and blends narration and contemplation, truth and imagination, as though the words have become mirrors to themselves, and so on and so forth.
Lebanese author Elias Khoury's My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto Volume I, translated by Humphrey Davies, is a complex, and at times difficult to follow, but powerful novel. The English translation comes with a glossary - I only wish I had discovered it while reading rather than on the final pages.
At its heart it tells the story of the Palestinian community in Lydda during and in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and in particular of those left behind, after the exodus of the vast majority of citizens during the 'Nakba', who found themselves confined to ghettos. (See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus_from_Lydda_and_Ramle)
The story is narrated by Adam Dannoun, an Palestinian-Israeli, born in 1948 and now living in New York running a falafel shop. He had always 'known' that he was the first child to be born in the ghetto of Lydda, although for much of his life he had told others than he was Jewish, born instead in the Warsaw ghetto, to an extent that he almost believed this identity himself. (I really was a son of the ghetto, and my claims to Polish origins and to being from Warsaw were no more than an appropriate metaphor to describe my childhood in Lydda.) And in his shop he encounters some older ex-inhabitants of Lydda who give him a different perspective on his own birth story, shaking some of his assumptions.
The novel we are reading is more - as the opening quote suggests - of a proto-novel, a failed attempt to write a coherent tale. Indeed Adam argues that as a reader he doesn't even need to write:
Despite the conviction of my teachers at the Wadi al-Nisnas school that I would become a poet or a writer, I have spent the whole of my life unable, or, let us say, unwilling, to write. I satisfied myself with writing articles in Hebrew on the aesthetics of the Arabic musical modes and never attempted to write a single short story; even though my head was awash with stories that I made up for myself, I never wrote them down. The reason was my infatuation with reading. Don’t misunderstand me: my infatuation with reading doesn’t imply any feelings on my part of inadequacy before the creations of the writers whose novels and verses I love. On the contrary, the feeling that affects me when I read a beautiful text is of being a partner in its writing or, more accurately, of being its true author. The actual writer becomes no more than a meaningless name or signature. This feeling took me to faraway places of whose existence I had never dreamed and made me feel full. I am a writer full of the texts that I have read/ written and that I treat as though real, and I exploit the imagination of others to serve my own. From this perspective, I’m the writer who never wrote anything because he wrote everything, and this makes me superior to all the rest of the world’s writers, who sense that an arid emptiness surrounds them, while I feel pleasure and a thirst for yet more of the water of words.
The story he tells also includes his attempt to write a novel about the seventh century Yemeni poet Waddah al-Yaman (see e.g. https://al-bab.com/waddah-al-yaman-national-poet), whose life was ended by Ummayad Caliph Al-Walid I. The poet was in love with the Caliph's wife and spent his days in her chambers hiding in a coffer in the day and emerging to spend the night with her. When the caliph was alerted to the deception he had the coffer locked and buried, reasoning that if his wife had been unfaithful then the culprit had been eliminated, if she hadn't then he had simply buried a wooden box, and either way her guilt need not be discussed further.
Although the novel is loaded with symbolism and seemingly highly political, the narrator resists that interpretation:
I don’t feel comfortable with messages in literature. Literature is like love: it loses its meaning when turned into a medium for something else that goes beyond it, because nothing goes beyond love, and nothing has more meaning than the stirrings of the human soul whose pulse is to be felt in literature. I repeat: literature exists without reference to any meaning located outside it, and I want Palestine to become a text that exists without reference to its current historical conditionality, because, based on my long experience of that country, I’ve come to believe that nothing lasts but the relationship to the adim – the skin – of the land, from which derives the name of Adam , peace be upon him, that they gave me when I was born.
The narrator claims that the story of the poet is not an allegory, although if there is a common element it is the way that Waddah al-Yaman, as the Palestinians left in Lydda, and indeed the victims of the Nazi holocaust were (unfairly) criticised for failing to resist their fate:
I refuse to write an allegory, for the reader who sees in the story of Waddah al-Yaman a symbol of Palestine will simply reduce it to a human metaphor for the Palestinians and all the world’s persecuted, including the Jews.
...
but whenever I’d read in the faces of my Israeli friends, or in Israeli texts, contempt for, or criticism of, the Jews of Europe for being driven to the slaughter like sheep, I’d feel I was suffocating. I think the image transforms them into heroes and the hollow criticism directed at them only points to the folly of those who think that the power they possess today will last for ever; indeed, that contempt may have been the first sign of the racism that would later spread like an epidemic through Israeli political society.
Indeed even the novel's title is taken from Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, an important work of early Zionist literature.
The novel itself is narrated in a very non-linear fashion by Adam, circling round the two stories, reapproaching the moments of his birth and the early days and months in the ghetto, days he experienced only as an infant and therefore can only relay the tales he is told by others, stories that don't necessarily cohere.
I want my story to uncover its own gaps, because I’m not writing a witness report, I’m writing a story derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory.
His account is also steeped in literature, from the Sufi poets to modern day novelists and poets (particularly Mahmoud Darwish), Israeli and Arabic, including Elias Khoury himself. Indeed in a meta-fictional twist, we are told the novel we are reading was a manuscript passed to Elias Khoury by Sarang Lee, a young Korean student of Khoury's but in love with both Khoury and Adam (사랑, sarang, in Korean means love). The novel was found in his papers after Adam's death, in a fire, but possibly one he deliberately started, in a deliberate mirror of the (real-life) death of Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Hussein). And to add another - perhaps one too many to be frank - layer to the story, Adam claims to know as real people the fictional characters in Khoury's most famous novel, Gate of the Sun (as well as characters in other novels):
I fail to understand how writers can defend their heroes by saying they’re fictional and not factual. Phooey to them! I consider Hamlet to be more real than Shakespeare, the Idiot more tangible than Dostoevsky, Yunis more factual than that Lebanese writer who distorted his image in Gate of the Sun, etc. (Here I will have to make a footnote to say that I know Khalil Ayoub, narrator of Gate of the Sun, personally. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that I know all the characters in the novels I like just as well as I know Khalil Ayoub.
Overall - this is clearly a highly literary as well as emotionally and politically powerful novel, although at times I struggled with the necessary background information to fully appreciate or understand it.
The following interviews and reviews were very helpful to my understanding - indeed at times somewhat more so that the novel itself.
https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium.MAGAZINE-between-the-trauma-of-the-holocaust-and-the-trauma-of-nakba-1.6076181
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180222-from-jewish-ghettos-to-palestinian-ghettos-elias-khoury-on-his-new-novel/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/qa-terrible-moment-arab-world-160224111329546.html
Lebanese author Elias Khoury's My Name is Adam: Children of the Ghetto Volume I, translated by Humphrey Davies, is a complex, and at times difficult to follow, but powerful novel. The English translation comes with a glossary - I only wish I had discovered it while reading rather than on the final pages.
At its heart it tells the story of the Palestinian community in Lydda during and in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and in particular of those left behind, after the exodus of the vast majority of citizens during the 'Nakba', who found themselves confined to ghettos. (See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus_from_Lydda_and_Ramle)
The story is narrated by Adam Dannoun, an Palestinian-Israeli, born in 1948 and now living in New York running a falafel shop. He had always 'known' that he was the first child to be born in the ghetto of Lydda, although for much of his life he had told others than he was Jewish, born instead in the Warsaw ghetto, to an extent that he almost believed this identity himself. (I really was a son of the ghetto, and my claims to Polish origins and to being from Warsaw were no more than an appropriate metaphor to describe my childhood in Lydda.) And in his shop he encounters some older ex-inhabitants of Lydda who give him a different perspective on his own birth story, shaking some of his assumptions.
The novel we are reading is more - as the opening quote suggests - of a proto-novel, a failed attempt to write a coherent tale. Indeed Adam argues that as a reader he doesn't even need to write:
Despite the conviction of my teachers at the Wadi al-Nisnas school that I would become a poet or a writer, I have spent the whole of my life unable, or, let us say, unwilling, to write. I satisfied myself with writing articles in Hebrew on the aesthetics of the Arabic musical modes and never attempted to write a single short story; even though my head was awash with stories that I made up for myself, I never wrote them down. The reason was my infatuation with reading. Don’t misunderstand me: my infatuation with reading doesn’t imply any feelings on my part of inadequacy before the creations of the writers whose novels and verses I love. On the contrary, the feeling that affects me when I read a beautiful text is of being a partner in its writing or, more accurately, of being its true author. The actual writer becomes no more than a meaningless name or signature. This feeling took me to faraway places of whose existence I had never dreamed and made me feel full. I am a writer full of the texts that I have read/ written and that I treat as though real, and I exploit the imagination of others to serve my own. From this perspective, I’m the writer who never wrote anything because he wrote everything, and this makes me superior to all the rest of the world’s writers, who sense that an arid emptiness surrounds them, while I feel pleasure and a thirst for yet more of the water of words.
The story he tells also includes his attempt to write a novel about the seventh century Yemeni poet Waddah al-Yaman (see e.g. https://al-bab.com/waddah-al-yaman-national-poet), whose life was ended by Ummayad Caliph Al-Walid I. The poet was in love with the Caliph's wife and spent his days in her chambers hiding in a coffer in the day and emerging to spend the night with her. When the caliph was alerted to the deception he had the coffer locked and buried, reasoning that if his wife had been unfaithful then the culprit had been eliminated, if she hadn't then he had simply buried a wooden box, and either way her guilt need not be discussed further.
Although the novel is loaded with symbolism and seemingly highly political, the narrator resists that interpretation:
I don’t feel comfortable with messages in literature. Literature is like love: it loses its meaning when turned into a medium for something else that goes beyond it, because nothing goes beyond love, and nothing has more meaning than the stirrings of the human soul whose pulse is to be felt in literature. I repeat: literature exists without reference to any meaning located outside it, and I want Palestine to become a text that exists without reference to its current historical conditionality, because, based on my long experience of that country, I’ve come to believe that nothing lasts but the relationship to the adim – the skin – of the land, from which derives the name of Adam , peace be upon him, that they gave me when I was born.
The narrator claims that the story of the poet is not an allegory, although if there is a common element it is the way that Waddah al-Yaman, as the Palestinians left in Lydda, and indeed the victims of the Nazi holocaust were (unfairly) criticised for failing to resist their fate:
I refuse to write an allegory, for the reader who sees in the story of Waddah al-Yaman a symbol of Palestine will simply reduce it to a human metaphor for the Palestinians and all the world’s persecuted, including the Jews.
...
but whenever I’d read in the faces of my Israeli friends, or in Israeli texts, contempt for, or criticism of, the Jews of Europe for being driven to the slaughter like sheep, I’d feel I was suffocating. I think the image transforms them into heroes and the hollow criticism directed at them only points to the folly of those who think that the power they possess today will last for ever; indeed, that contempt may have been the first sign of the racism that would later spread like an epidemic through Israeli political society.
Indeed even the novel's title is taken from Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, an important work of early Zionist literature.
The novel itself is narrated in a very non-linear fashion by Adam, circling round the two stories, reapproaching the moments of his birth and the early days and months in the ghetto, days he experienced only as an infant and therefore can only relay the tales he is told by others, stories that don't necessarily cohere.
I want my story to uncover its own gaps, because I’m not writing a witness report, I’m writing a story derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory.
His account is also steeped in literature, from the Sufi poets to modern day novelists and poets (particularly Mahmoud Darwish), Israeli and Arabic, including Elias Khoury himself. Indeed in a meta-fictional twist, we are told the novel we are reading was a manuscript passed to Elias Khoury by Sarang Lee, a young Korean student of Khoury's but in love with both Khoury and Adam (사랑, sarang, in Korean means love). The novel was found in his papers after Adam's death, in a fire, but possibly one he deliberately started, in a deliberate mirror of the (real-life) death of Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Hussein). And to add another - perhaps one too many to be frank - layer to the story, Adam claims to know as real people the fictional characters in Khoury's most famous novel, Gate of the Sun (as well as characters in other novels):
I fail to understand how writers can defend their heroes by saying they’re fictional and not factual. Phooey to them! I consider Hamlet to be more real than Shakespeare, the Idiot more tangible than Dostoevsky, Yunis more factual than that Lebanese writer who distorted his image in Gate of the Sun, etc. (Here I will have to make a footnote to say that I know Khalil Ayoub, narrator of Gate of the Sun, personally. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that I know all the characters in the novels I like just as well as I know Khalil Ayoub.
Overall - this is clearly a highly literary as well as emotionally and politically powerful novel, although at times I struggled with the necessary background information to fully appreciate or understand it.
The following interviews and reviews were very helpful to my understanding - indeed at times somewhat more so that the novel itself.
https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium.MAGAZINE-between-the-trauma-of-the-holocaust-and-the-trauma-of-nakba-1.6076181
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180222-from-jewish-ghettos-to-palestinian-ghettos-elias-khoury-on-his-new-novel/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/qa-terrible-moment-arab-world-160224111329546.html
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