Giving up, moving out
A NEW BOOK BY AN ARABISRAELI IS A MELANCHOLY TAKE ON THE TERRIBLY SLOW PROGRESS TOWARD TRUE PEACE.
Despite all that happened, despite all t he vi ol ence and hatred surrounding him, Sayed Kashua still managed to write about life in Israel with a light heart. He clung to the idea that Jews and Arabs would eventually build a peaceful society in the beautiful country they shared. Because, what else could they do?
In that spirit he developed into a unique figure, an Arab citizen of Israel writing for the Israeli public in fluid Hebrew. He became a national figure as a weekly columnist for the leftist Ha’aretz newspaper and a writer of fiction and screenplays. In writing about his own life with his family he often turned the torment of the nation into a sly domestic comedy.
Kashua’s new book, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life (Grove Press), should be a success story. We should be able to enjoy it as an intimate and often delightful picture of Israeli life. A collection of pieces from Ha’aretz, it demonstrates his ability to write with rueful tolerance about the second- class citizenship Israel grants the 20 per cent of its people who are Arabs. But Native is also a study of disillusionment.
Born in 1975 in the mainly Arabic town of Tira, Kashua was picked out of his high school class as a candidate for an elite Jewish school in Jerusalem. He qualified and spent much of his adolescence in a boarding school. He was 14 when he saw his first library. The first book he read in Hebrew, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, fired his sense of possibility. He grew up as neither an Arab nationalist nor a Zionist. In his ideal nation, all citizens will be equal.
As African-Americans say about race, you can’t escape it. It follows you everywhere. And for Arabs in Israel, as Kashua sees it, their status can never be forgotten. It makes even the most routine encounter between Arab and Jew into a drama of ethnic identity. There’s no shame in being an Arab, but Kashua doesn’t care to be identified; he wants to escape labelling.
When Kashua and his kindergarten-age daughter were at a mall, sitting in their car as they waited in the lineup for the security check, she asked, “Daddy, can I speak Arabic now?” Of course, he said, you can speak Arabic anywhere.
The security guard looked in the car window and said, in Hebrew, “What’s happening? Everything all right?” That, Kashua explains, was a way of checking Kashua’s accent. Before he could answer in careful Hebrew, his daughter replied in Arabic that everything was fine. “ID card, please,” said the guard. They got in, but Kashua changed his fatherly advice: it’s fine to speak Arabic anywhere else, but not at the entrance to a mall.
For an Arab who often travels, Ben Gurion Airport presents special problems. Kashua tries to avoid saying where he’s from, since Jerusalem in Hebrew is impossible for an Arab to pronounce — it’s “the nightmare of every posturing Arab.” His status as an Arab intensifies the everyday paranoia that most of us experience when confronting airport security. He doesn’t carry a computer, since he believes it’s assumed that “An Arab with a computer is nothing less than an agent of Hezbollah.” He calls the X- ray machines Arab detectors. In his suitcase he carries underwear and socks from Hugo Boss or Calvin Klein, to impress the guards. “An Arab, yes, but an Arab with class.”
His satire becomes more abrasive when Kashua and his family move from an ethnically mixed district into a Jewish neighbourhood where they are the only Arabs. He writes as if reporting from a distant world. “All the streets are paved and there are lanes for pedestrians, called sidewalks,” he reports. “It’s been seven whole days and there hasn’t been one water stoppage.” It’s scary to take a shower: “The Jews have such strong water pressure.”
In one long sentence he notes the different literary tastes of his fellow citizens: “If an Arab reader looks for a punching bag that will make him feel more congenial about his political impotence, the Jew will for sure look for a book that will give him an anthropological experience, a rare look in the mind of an Arab, or a book that is a journey into the very heart of Arab society.”
Eventually Kashua found the disappointment of Israel’s progress too much. He planned to go abroad with his family for a year’s respite, but in 2014 the struggle between Hamas and Israel broke out. He decided one year wasn’t enough. At the moment he’s teaching in the Israel Studies Project at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. “I’m not sure that I recovered, but I also know that I cannot afford going back yet.” Now he writes for Ha’aretz from Champaign. Meanwhile, he’s given us this moving, revealing and in the end melancholy book.