The Children of the Ghetto

August 15, 2024
A Palestinian exile recalls his ordeals as a child and young adult. This work by the acclaimed Lebanese author Khoury is a follow-up to his novelThe Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam (2019). While that novel considered the life and death of its title character in a fragmentary fashion, here Khoury's approach is more straightforward, if still suffused with irony and anguish. Adam grew up in Lydda, a ghetto formed by Israel during the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians known as the Nakba. As a teenager in the 1960s, Adam escapes his abusive stepfather, finding odd jobs in a garage and a restaurant, eventually landing in Haifa and pursuing the study of Hebrew literature. But he cloaks his Palestinian identity to get by, tweaking his last name slightly (from Dannoun to Danoun). On a class trip to Warsaw, he meets a participant in the Jewish ghetto uprising there, provoking a debate between him and his teacher about whether it's best to stand one's ground or live in exile. Khoury has long been focused on the aftereffects of the Nakba, most notably inGate of the Sun (2006), emphasizing the cruelty of the forced expulsion and the confusions of statelessness; Adam satirizes the bureaucratese that makes him a "present absentee" in Israel. But though death and loss are key themes (major plot points involve murder and suicide), romance is also central to the novel, as Adam recalls his intense, hopeful, and difficult relationships with women. That doesn't soften the harshness of the events Khoury chronicles, but it does add lyrical and deeper elements to what's ultimately a tragic story. A powerful chronicle of the search for peace and identity amid constant disruption.

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Starred review from September 23, 2024
A Palestinian man leads a double life in Israel in Khoury’s beautiful and bewitching sequel to My Name Is Adam. The narrative recounts the early years of Adam Dannoun, before he became the New York City falafel seller portrayed in the first book. Born in Lydda in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he’s 15 when he leaves his mother’s house in Haifa. He leads a peripatetic life over the next few years, working at a Jewish mechanic’s garage and a Palestinian woman’s bakery until he begins studying Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa and finds in the subject a “mirror for his soul.” At the university, Adam, who is fair-skinned, changes his last name to Danon and assumes a Jewish identity. Over the subsequent decades, he tries to transform himself “into a man of many faces, origin unknown,” until he’s unwittingly implicated in an act of political violence. In lyrical and philosophical prose, Khoury masterfully depicts Adam’s ambivalence about his origins (“If you had asked Adam to tell you his mother’s story, he would have written pages and pages in white ink. That’s how he always imagined himself—writing white on white, rather than writing and then erasing the way writers do”). The result is a poignant and deeply humane exploration of Palestinian identity.

October 1, 2024
Adam, born in 1948 to freedom-fighter Palestinians behind barbed wire in a ghetto in Palestine, is determined to forge his own destiny. After a beating from Israeli police ("he'd realized that being in the right and being maltreated went hand in hand") and abandoning his mother and abusive stepfather, he is virtually adopted by an Israeli garage owner who believes Adam resembles his lost brother. Gradually the blond and light-skinned Adam, who speaks nearly perfect Hebrew and longs to study Hebrew literature at Haifa University, changes his last name and begins to "pass" as Jewish. His identity conflict comes to a head when he is outed on a university tour of Auschwitz. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the Holocaust yet seeking to reconcile his sorrow with his anger over Palestinian suffering, Adam ruefully concludes that "this world isn't big enough for two tragedies." Khoury skillfully evokes the cruel absurdities of Israeli occupation as Adam attempts to cope with past and present anguish. The second in a trilogy, following My Name Is Adam (2019), this novel can be enjoyed on its own.

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