A review by alexisrt
All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan

5.0

Israeli Liat and Palestinian Hilmi meet in New York, neutral ground, in 2001 and fall in love. Writing a political novel is a tricky balancing act, especially one in which the main characters are, in some sense, a personification of the political. Characters in fiction must also be people, not representations that exist to give speeches. Although there are a couple of explicit conversations about the conflict, most of the politics here are delicately drawn. Everything in their lives is political, from Liat's army service, to food, to the very languages they speak (they communicate in English; some of Hilmi's Arabic is rendered as it would have been in the Hebrew original, translated in footnotes).

There is no great resolution here, no grand statements. Their relationship is both wonderful and incredibly, impossibly sad. Rabinyan doesn't stake out a position on the conflict; she does, however, try to shrink it to a complex miniature.