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laura_trap 's review for:
Sadness Is a White Bird
by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Take a deep breath, steady yourself, and then open up this book. This book will hit you hard, it will hit you mercilessly, and leave you full and bursting and crying. It's a relatively short book, but it deals with so much. Our antagonist, Jonathan or Yonatan, is growing, he is Israeli, and ready to do his familial and patriotic duty of joining the military for compulsory service. But just before that he befriends twins, brother and sister, and they are Arabs and we see how much of a young ignorant boy Jonathan is. We see how blind we are, where the thin lines of oppression are, and how heavy the weight of hate is. And how deep it runs. I love this book, I desperately love this book, each word, each phrase, each step in this journey was powerful and complex and written to beautifully. Even the hard bits. Especially the hard bits.
It's not simple, and the author doesn't try to simplify something as complex as the tension and violence of social strata and geography over in Israel. Nor does he wash away the past. He creates a very poignant picture of how the culture of Jewishness and Israel is very much entwined with its pass, how a once nationless people finally have a soil to call their own and with the beast like viciousness in which they protect it. On the flip side, he shows us with clear sighted vision and word-craft the oppression, the fear, and the restrictions that surround the Palestinians who live within Israel's borders.
It's not simple, and the author doesn't try to simplify something as complex as the tension and violence of social strata and geography over in Israel. Nor does he wash away the past. He creates a very poignant picture of how the culture of Jewishness and Israel is very much entwined with its pass, how a once nationless people finally have a soil to call their own and with the beast like viciousness in which they protect it. On the flip side, he shows us with clear sighted vision and word-craft the oppression, the fear, and the restrictions that surround the Palestinians who live within Israel's borders.