In 2014, Dorit Rabinyan, an established Israeli author, published a novel entitled “Gader Haya.” Well before the book was translated into over 20 languages, including in English as “All the Rivers” (2017), it gained international acclaim by being dramatically barred from the Israeli school curriculum. The Ministry of Education argued that “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews”—specifically, the main characters of the novel are Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Muslim—“are seen by large portions of society as a threat on the separate identities.” For including a romantic relationship between a Palestinian and a Jew (a not uncommon theme in 1980s and ’90s Israeli cinema, incidentally), Rabinyan was called an enemy of the state and compared to Hamas. The backlash was immediate; people across Israel supported Rabinyan and soon players around the globe took up the gauntlet. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, even wrote her fan mail.
Like Rabinyan, Zeeva Bukai is interested in the star-crossed love between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews. And like Rabinyan, Bukai often seems more critical of the “self” than the “other”: in both of their novels, the Palestinian men are almost too kind, too handsome, too sensitive to seem real. They are poets, artists, dreamers. But Bukai is so invested in imagining the impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict within the domestic confines of a romantic relationship, she tells the story twice in her beautifully written, riveting debut novel, “The Anatomy of Exile.” Each version of this story has elements of Rabinyan’s: One has a similarly tragic end (I won’t spoil it), and the other asks if the conflict is relevant in the melting pot of America.
To be clear, though, Bukai is not merely repeating Rabinyan’s formula. While using romance allows her to investigate issues of identity, nationality, religion and ethnicity, and to challenge Jewish readers to think about their prejudices against Palestinians and Muslims, it is not the only tool in Bukai’s box. In fact, Bukai’s greatest skill lies in her ability to probe the inner life of her protagonist, Tamar, and Tamar’s marriage to Salim. Tamar is the center of her family and the center of the novel. She is a character I felt I knew well, perhaps, in part, because I saw my mother in her. Like Salim, my Mizrahi father seemed to make many of our family’s decisions unilaterally, worked too hard, and had a bad temper. And like Tamar, my Ashkenazi mother, daughter of Polish parents, tried to please and smooth over, to make nice. But my mother never lived in Israel in the first decades of the state, when the divide between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi separated power and privilege on one side, and discrimination on the other. Bukai portrays her heroine, Tamar, as laden with guilt, struggling to understand and keep happy her Syrian Jewish husband who resents her comfortable status in Israel.
By keeping close to Tamar’s consciousness, Bukai shows us the “Arab Jew” Salim through the more familiar Ashkenazi character. Tamar doesn’t speak Arabic, and although she loves Salim and his sister, Hadas, she finds them both “unknowable, distant, hidden from her”; moreover, when Salim and Hadas speak to each other in Arabic, Tamar “felt like a foreigner, alien in her body, in her country.” She even makes the mistake, when she thinks Salim’s logic is faulty, superstitious, of asking “What are we, Arabs now?” only to have him remind her “You forget, I’m an Arab.” If Tamar feels she is the foreigner with Salim, Salim sees himself as a foreigner, an outsider, in Israel as he was in Syria. In Damascus they’d called him “yahudi maloun, a dirty Jew, and in Israel, aravi masriach, a stinking Arab.” Still, he is the one who can understand what’s going on in Six-Day War, broadcast on Radio Cairo, translating for the rest. Later, in New York, he is the one who understands, linguistically and culturally, the Palestinian family that moves into their building. The Palestinian father, in fact, functions as Salim’s double: same height, same language, same tastes, same patriarchal attitudes, same “touch of tyranny.”
“The Anatomy of Exile” is a hard read in the climate of war…
“The Anatomy of Exile” is a hard read in the climate of war, in the early days of which even Rabinyan, interviewed by “The New York Times,” declared that her “compassion is somehow paralyzed.” And yet, perhaps it’s the most important time to read a novel like this one, to consider all the kinds of loss involved in this never-ending conflict. “The Anatomy of Exile” begins just after the Six-Day War and ends soon after the Yom Kippur war, but the narrative also takes us back to the younger years of the state, to Tamar and Salim’s courtship. The courtship takes place on Kafr Ma’an, a fictional Palestinian village that, over the course of the novel, disappears under the growing campus of Tel Aviv University. This land, which is put to poetry by a character in the novel—and to prose by the author—stands out as a harrowing image of loss.
The village is likely based on Al-Shaykh Muwannis, a citrus-growing community that was abandoned in March, 1948, due to intimidation by the Hagganah. Once in Israeli hands, it was given over to the influx of North African Jewish migrants before it was emptied altogether, razed. In the novel, Salim and Hadas live there after arriving from Syria, and at night, the Palestinians who fled their land come back to pick fruit, to touch the soil that was once their soil. Tamar, visiting, hears them and asks Hadas what they’re saying. “Remember this sweetness,” Hadas translates. But remember is all they could do, for, “Come dawn,” Bukai writes, “they disappeared like ghosts in the morning fog.”
Karen Skinazi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture and the director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol (UK) and the author of “Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture.”
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