Sayed Kashua

A collection of personal columns Kashua wrote for the Hebrew paper Haaretz from 2006-2014, detailing his family life as a Palestinian in Israel, sometimes funny and sometimes depressing as he continues to be considered an outsider in his own country.

It's hard to summarize this collection of columns, which started off reminding me of Bill Bryson a little bit in his sardonic observations and making himself out to be a bumbling sort of father and husband, and then became more and more pointed (or maybe I was just noticing more) in the everyday slights Kashua and his family endure. In some ways, it reminded me a lot of what many people of color experience in the U.S. - the distrust at the airport, being slighted at book fairs, or even the threat of violence. Kashua writes in Hebrew and starts out optimistic, hoping that he can educate, but the later articles show his own growing despair that anything can change.… (more)

Kashua, an Arab-Israeli living in Jerusalem, originally wrote this book as a series of columns in the (Hebrew) Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and the theme of an Arab working and spending much of his time in a largely Jewish-Israeli milieu runs through the work. Kashua writes himself as a befuddled, sardonic figure, balancing the comic and the tragic, the personal and political, sometimes in the space of only a few pages. Largely without making explicit political pronouncements, he shows the difficulties, even humiliations, of his position through daily events: What does it mean for his daughter to play in a festival for Yom Haatzmaut? How is he treated at Ben-Gurion Airport? What do we do with the mezuzah on the doorpost of our new apartment? narrated with a razor-sharp humor.

In the end, Kashua can take it no more: the cries of "Death to Arabs!" are too much, and he takes his family to the US. I can't help but think that's a loss for us all.… (more)

Though it technically it takes place on the Israel side of the Green Line, this was very much a Palestinian novel by a Palestinian author. It is a satirical dark comedy about an unnamed narrator who grows up in an Arab village and continues to go back and forth between Arab and Israeli society. Though the book had some funny moments and I appreciated that it shined light on the prejudice experienced by Arab Israelis from Jewish Israelis, I didn't love the novel because I didn't find the characters relatable or particularly likeable, and it annoyed me how many of the characters were intentionally left unnamed.… (more)