Ibtisam Barakat

I never considered what would be like for Palestinians to have their land taken away and given to Israel. This book is a memoir of a girl who experienced the war between the Palestinians and Israel. The author writes beautifully and honestly of what it was like to live through the conflict. It's not a diatribe against Israel; it is just the story of a child living through turmoil in her world. I decided to get the book for my school library, though it may be a little too much for all but the show more upper grades. show less

Most of the book is the recollections of the 6 day war and a few following years in the authors early childhood. A picture of the life of a family deeply disturbed by war and threats of violence and made rich with cohesive and resourceful family and love of learning and life.

This beautifully written memoir gives us a glimpse into the childhood of Ibtisam Barakat, a Palestinian refugee. Although Ibtisam grew up in a country ravaged by war, not all of her memories are unhappy ones. She held on to a strong sense of home and family and her love for writing helped her deal with some of the scary things that happened to her. Although a lot of things about her childhood were very different from an American child's, many things were the same. I think this book is a show more great starting point for introducing the Israel-Palestine conflict and for showing kids that they can have something in common with kids halfway around the world. show less

In this action packed and depressing biography, a Palestinian girl, Ibtisam Barakat, fights her way through a war she could not control.

This starts off as the reader meets a girl named Ibtisam, who is coming home from her postal box, where she writes to her pen-pals, on a bus that is traveling to a Palestinian city called Ramallah. She soon finds herself in an Israeli roadblock, and is sent, with the other passengers, to a military compound. During this time, Palestine was under Israeli show more influence. When she is at the compound, some soldiers had the chance to search the passengers. Only one went to choose, and he chose a boy. When the soldier was searching him, the boy started laughing hysterically. The soldier then beat the boy very badly in front of everyone and allowed them to go home.

When Ibtisam got home you got introduced to her family. Her Father was named Suleiman, her Mother’s name was Miriam. She also had two brothers named Basel and Muhammad. Her Mother in particular throughout her memory accounts, wasn’t the nicest person in the world. Her Mother beat her too just like her Father if she had done something wrong. Ibtisam soon apologized for going on that bus to begin with and suddenly remembers the hard times of going through war at age six.

Her memory starts out at the beginning of the war. Her Mother was making dinner and they waited for her Father to come home from work. When her Father came home he was running towards the house. He said that the war had started and for Ibtisam to turn back. They soon gathered their supplies and ran into the garden and made a trench. Soon the sirens began to wail, her sister was crying from the loud noises, and they heard many explosions and planes above them. Ibtisam Mother realized that she did not have enough food for all of them, so she gunned it back to the house. Shots buzzed everywhere near her Mother and then she fell down. Her Father came to her and said that the shots had missed. They soon found other groups running away in the woods so they decided to go with them because they knew they weren’t safe in the trench anymore. When they rushed to get out, Ibtisam was still putting on her shoes and didn’t realize they had left. She soon ran into the woods after them, but she had left her shoe behind so her foot was getting cut and bruised from the objects on the ground. She soon found her parents and they tried to find refuge elsewhere. From that point on she had loads of adventures.

In the book Ibtisam also had a lot of adventures. When she and her family were looking for refuge, her father hijacked a passerby’s car and banded together with other refuges to force the driver to obey. Ibtisam Mother soon started having a great friendship with the driver’s wife, Hamameh. They soon found themselves in a safe house for refuges, and stayed there for a week while her father left with the other men to help more refuges. By that point, Ibtisam foot had swelled as big as a melon, so when they left they took her to the hospital.

When they were at the hospital, the Doctor helped Ibtisam. He treated her foot by injecting a syringe in her foot and put it into a cast. When the cast finally came off she danced and played in the streets out of joy. Soon after, her parents decided to move to a large school complex for a safer refuge.

When the time was right, they all went back to their original home. They noticed that their home was damaged by the war, and bullet holes ravaged the inside. A part of the house that was affected was the roof, which had been blown to pieces, but her father fixed it. Later that afternoon soldiers set up a training camp in front of their home. This made Ibtisam Mother very angry and told Ibtisam Father that they should place them in an orphanage. Out of worry, her father agreed and drove them to the Dar El-Tifl’s orphanage in Jericho.

At the orphanage, Ibtisam’s brothers were transferred to a boy’s school called Jalazone Boys School. This made Ibtisam very angry because she used her brothers as protection against bullies, and they were the only family she had there, besides her mother. Her only friend was a piece of chalk from the playground that she named Alef. Her parents soon went back and got her and brought her to see her brothers. Then on June 1st they all got to go home together again.

From that point on at their home, the boys had to get ready for their circumcisions, which is a Palestinian ceremony that makes a boy a “man”. They received a goat that gave birth to another named Zuraiq, they all went to an normal school, and final they moved away from their house into a newer and safer one.

I gave this book five stars for a lot of “good” reasons. The first reason is, when I read this book, my mind had gotten so into the story I would lose track of time and where I was. I would soon realize that I had read more pages than I was supposed to, and I thought that was very “strange”, in a good way. This meant that my brain was so engaged in everything in this story, I didn’t want to stop. It’s almost like watching a movie when your parents say “You’ve got to go now, you can watch it later!” When your mind says “no” and tunes out the voice, so it keeps watching because of the engaging storyline. In this case it was a book, and the voice was Mr. Bronson’s assignment. The authors writing also contributed most inevitably also.

The way the author, Ibtisam Barakat, writes is “totally killer”, quote Mr. Bronson. Her writing is so “killer” because she writes in the deepest detail in every sentence, so it actually seems like you’re standing next to her when she was a child. A quote that shows this is, “We sat on the red earth, talking and laughing, the setting sun a bonfire before us.” When I read that line, I immediately saw the setting sun, bright as could be, and I could feel the cool earth engulf my body. From your perspective you might say to yourself, “Gee that line just sounds like poetry. I don’t think I would want to listen to a poetry book!” I now tell you that you’re wrong because she writes in many other forms, mostly dark. For example, “The soldier punches him again. The boy’s laughter now zigzags up and down like a mouse trying to flee and not knowing which way to turn. But a kick on the knee from the soldier’s boot finally makes the boy cry.” The author showed in this quote that most people were beaten by the Israel soldiers no matter who they were. This type of writing takes practice and a strong memory of the past, but Ibtisam was not a trained author and she just wrote down her true experiences. She also incorporates this type of writing in reconnecting her past emotions and then translating them into the pages in this book. I even twitched when a bad “event” happened, for example when Ibtisam’s mother was getting shot at. The whole suddenness and the realization that this actually happened to this girl’s mother, and that this girl witnessed this happen, I just found it ironic. Great writers usually always have a drastic change in their lives or depressing time in their lives that compelled them to write a book about it. Her whole character and story idea was another important point also.

Another reason why I gave this book five stars is because of Ibtisam’s character and her whole story. In my opinion, I love Ibtisam in every part of the story. She is very headstrong and is very attached to her family. This relates to me as I am attached to my family as well. Although she has her ups and downs with her parents who beat her for discipline, I find that she is very humorous and childish. This is the reason why I like her, because in this memory she has the eyes of a child. This is an awesome experience if you have the right author to translate every detail into his or her character, and in this case you do.

When I read her accounts, the child in me fluttered like a bird as I saw the same traits in Ibtisam’s world as in my own. For example, in the chapter “Lentils” she does not want to eat her Lentil vegetables because they, in her opinion, were terrible but she had to eat them or her mother would chastise her. It is that childishness that reflected on me when I did not want to eat my applesauce because it was laced with cough medicine when I was sick, when I was younger. Another reason why I love Ibtisam is because of what she went through. It will never compare to anyone else’s experiences in the world. She, in my opinion, was the bravest girl that experienced war in this story. She even was a little better than Anne Frank handling her Nazi troubles. All of the other girls were scared, but it was Ibtisam that had a swollen foot for four weeks and never complained about it. Just what she went through brings a tear to my eye because she suffered greatly and this war is still going on between Palestine and Israel today.

No one would suffer any more if they only read this incredible story today! show less