“The beginning of life was the massacre and I have to gather together the scraps of its stories.”
The speaker here is Adam Dannoun, the hero of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s final work, the epic trilogy “Children of the Ghetto.” (Khoury died at 76 in Beirut on Sept. 15, shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.)
Adam, who was a small child in the first volume, “My Name Is Adam” (2019), now appears as a teenager and young man in the second novel, “Star of the Sea.” The massacre Adam is referring to took place in 1948, inside what is now Israel. But this event is impossible to separate from today’s massacres in Gaza, or from the other crises — the mass expulsions, land thefts, imprisonment, historical appropriation and erasure — that constitute what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of their existence under occupation and in exile. The massacre is also, Khoury insists, impossible to separate from the Holocaust, the pogroms and the history of Jewish suffering that led to the creation of Israel.
“Catastrophes,” Adam says bitterly, reflecting on his own experience within this hall of mirrors, “however tragic they may be, liberate their victims from the truth and drive them to find a justification for everything.”
Adam has no choice about his own “liberation.” The son of a fallen resistance fighter, Hasan Dannoun, he’s rescued as a baby from the arms of his dead mother during the expulsion of Palestinians from the town of Lydda, in July 1948. He grows up with a foster mother, Manal, among the few Palestinians allowed to remain in a tiny quarter of the town, a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire.
Seven years later, Manal marries an abusive man who takes them to live a safer, if still impoverished, life in an Arab enclave in Haifa. As soon as he’s able, Adam escapes the home, and immediately encounters a strange new reality. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, he can effortlessly pass as a Jewish Israeli. In nearly every way, it’s easier for him to become one.
“Children of the Ghetto” is a picaresque, though one without comic intentions: Like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, Adam is an orphan and a rogue, a survivor and a trickster, even a bit of a romantic. It’s also about racial shape-shifting, appropriation and invisibility; you could put it on the same shelf with “Passing” and “Invisible Man.”
With no other options, Adam takes any identity that gives him a toehold in Israeli society. He finds work with a Jewish mechanic, Gabriel, who swears Adam is the mirror image of his own brother, who died in the Holocaust. But when Adam falls in love with Rivka, Gabriel’s teenage daughter, the mechanic (who knows Adam’s real identity) threatens to kill them both.
Later, he falls in love with the daughter of a prominent Arab Israeli dentist and member of the Knesset — ominously, her name is Karma — but when Karma’s father is murdered, Adam is caught up in a conspiracy involving his own stepfather and nearly imprisoned. In the end, however, even the Israeli authorities can’t piece together the full truth about his background or loyalties, and let him slip away.
The most poignant, and bizarre, incident in “Star of the Sea” is Adam’s trip to Poland, this time passing as a Jewish student of Hebrew literature under the sway of a charismatic professor, Jacob. Like many of the older men throughout “Children of the Ghetto,” Jacob takes pity on Adam’s vulnerability and assumes a quasi-fatherly role in his life. Adam even leads Jacob to believe that he survived the Warsaw ghetto as an infant.
While visiting the all-but-vanished remnants of the ghetto, Adam and Jacob make a special trip to meet Marek Edelman, the only surviving leader of the 1943 ghetto uprising, a monthlong rebellion by Polish Jews against the Nazis. Edelman (very much a real person, who died in 2009) was a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist workers’ party, and a committed anti-Zionist who remained in Poland after the war.
Jacob and Edelman get into a heated disagreement about the nature of heroism while Adam listens silently; then, when Edelman turns to him, Adam has an uncanny realization: “He felt like he was in the presence of someone who could have been his relative, and imagined his father, Hasan Dannoun, with a halo of the ashes of defeat as he told his visitors stories of his city.”
In his mind, Adam enters a mirror world where Edelman is not a hero of Jewish history but a Palestinian freedom fighter in Lydda. (The real Edelman often argued in favor of Palestinian rights and appealed to Palestinian militants to disarm, speaking as a fellow freedom fighter.)
Like this passage, much of “Children of the Ghetto” lingers somewhere between fiction and fact. Khoury was a lifelong student of, and participant in, the cause of Palestinian liberation; as a 19-year-old he left his prosperous Christian Lebanese family and volunteered to join the fedayeen resistance fighters in Jordan, and later became an indefatigable defender of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. His best-known novel, “Gate of the Sun,” is based on the stories of those refugees, collected in the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut.
Survivors’ accounts in “Children of the Ghetto” derive from painstaking research on the plight of Lydda’s Palestinian residents and the effacement of their cultural history. (Google “Lydda” and you’ll be directed to the town under its Israeli name, Lod.) Yet Adam, as a character, can only listen and barely absorb them: He was just a baby and remembers nothing of the Nakba’s brutality. “Sorrow may be one of humanity’s noblest emotions,” he observes at one point, “but it’s also the most monotonous.” Having to continually recreate himself within Israeli society, Adam witnesses over and over the absurd contradictions of a state that can never divorce itself from the people and culture it tries to erase.
At the end of this second installment, Adam has embarked on yet another new life in Tel Aviv, as a supposedly Jewish Israeli journalist writing columns about Umm Kulthum, the beloved Egyptian singer. Later, we know, he’ll leave Israel for New York, to work in a falafel restaurant and write his own novel. I have the feeling that when the concluding volume of “Children of the Ghetto” appears in English, we’ll have in our hands one of the most indelible epics in 21st-century literature, a Palestinian story no reader will be able to forget.
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