Tag: Humphrey Davies

The invisible man’s story: Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury

The first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto trilogy, My Name is Adam, presents itself as a collection of writings by a Palestinian falafel maker living in exile in New York City. Never intended for publication, they include an aborted attempt to write a novel about a seventh-century Yemini poet and the unedited attempt by the author, Adam Dannoun, to understand himself by writing his own story. After a lifetime of trying to leave history, his own and his people’s, behind, two events—the screening of a film based on Khoury’s famous novel Gate of the Sun, and a conversation with a man he has not seen since he was seven years old—motivate this decision to finally commit an account of his life to paper. He will then set the stage for his own death. Elias Khoury supposedly comes into possession of Adam’s notebooks after he has died and, following some consideration, decides to publish them as they are, unedited. The result is an often troubled and circular narrative beginning in New York and making its way back in time in an effort to reconstitute what he knows of his earliest years, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba. Born in Lydda in 1948 he wants to piece together as much as he can about the horrific events of the massacre in the city, the containment of the Arab residents in what the Israeli soldiers labelled a “ghetto,” and the harsh conditions he and his mother endured.

The double-authorship of the first volume—Khoury as the custodian of Adam’s writing—is assumed to be understood, but not mentioned, in Star of the Sea. Rather, the entire tone and approach of the work shifts as Adam steps back from his own story to adopt a distanced perspective: Point of Entry: the Third Person, or the Absent Conscience. That the narrator and author of the novel (and he does call it a novel at this point) is also the protagonist is not a secret, but as he makes clear in the opening passages, it does raise certain challenges:

The question keeping the writer of these stories awake at night is the following: how can the absentee write? Can they tell their own story using “I,” thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place?

Pronouns in Arabic are extraordinarily supple, unmatched in any other language. The written letters that take a person’s place are called “consciences”, but since the conscience is also an invisible  moral compass, how can a novelist write using the conscience of one who is absent? And finally, what does its corollary—that the conscience must be absent in order for a person to tell their story really mean?

So, although Adam’s account now takes a more straightforward and generally chronological quality, the multi-layered reflective and metafictional elements of the first volume persist, now that the present self (the writer) has separated himself from his past invisible, absent self and reluctant hero of his story.

Although he made passing references to his adolescent and young adult years in the first part of his grand life writing exercise, the primary focus of My Name is Adam was on a period of his life  history of which he had either no direct memories or only a child’s recollections. Now, Adam is on much firmer ground, memory-wise, and in a position to try to face his conflicted emotions about the choices he faced as he navigated life in a country to which he could never fully belong. This is, then, a story of one man’s relationship to his own identity and his desire to live without any history or nostalgia. Even if it means living a lie.

This second volume begins in 1963, with fifteen year-old Adam’s decision to leave home. He had moved to Haifa with his mother, Manal, following her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashal, and, after years of watching his relentless abuse drive her further into a lifeless shell, he knew it was time to get away. Manal seemed to know too and, on the night Adam left, she quietly saw him off, handing him his father’s will before he disappeared into the stormy night. He was now on his own.

With a short detour, Adam makes his way to the garage of mechanic named Gabriel, a Polish Jew who had picked him up one night when he was hitchhiking. Struck by the boy’s fair hair and skin, Gabriel saw in Adam the image of his deceased younger brother. He had promised that he could help him out, thinking of possibly teaching him his trade. But Adam was determined to continue his schooling. So the mechanic not only offered him a place to stay in return for odd jobs in the shop, but also helped him get into a Jewish school. His old life now behind him, this period marked the beginning of Adam’s new story. He changed his name from Dannoun to Danon, and with it he assumed a new identity. He looked the part, spoke Hebrew well, and his existing ghetto origin was malleable:

If the heroes of novels could break through the fourth wall (page) and speak without an intermediary, then Adam could very well have told his story not as the invisible man, but a man formed from his imagination. And indeed he had imagined an entire personality that both matched his true nature and was completely different. From the moment he left his mother’s house on the night of the rain, Adam realized that he could represent himself however he wanted by using certain true events to create a compelling background.

This new story follows the reinvented Adam through his first teenage love—unfortunately for him, it is with Gabriel’s daughter Rivka, a situation not destined to end well—into his university years and beyond. Although he enjoys new freedoms with his assumed Israeli identity, he cannot escape his official Arab designation so he often straddles the Jewish and Palestinian communities, spending his days in one and working and living in another. Along the way he meets an assortment of interesting individuals who will influence his life in varying ways, but the central focus of this second volume of Children of the Ghetto lies with the ghetto he where allows others to believe his origins actually lie—in Warsaw.

As a student of Hebrew Literature, Adam develops a close friendship with his German-born professor Jacob Ebenheiner, a relationship based on shared intellectual curiosities and interests. Jacob does not pry into Adam’s life, and the latter offers no details. But a class trip to Warsaw at the end of the first term will ultimately lead to a betrayal of his secret. The visit to Poland has huge impact on the eighteen year-old Palestinian-in-disguise—walking through the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto and listening, through a translator, to the stories of the guide and survivors. But it is an evening spent in the company of Marek Edelmann, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and life-long anti-Zionist who remained in Poland and became a famed cardiologist, that unsettles him most. Adam is not only left questioning who he is and where he belongs, but it brings to light the extent of the gap that exists between himself and his defiantly proud Israeli teacher.

Throughout this book, Adam relies on a degree of invisibility afforded by his appearance to continue to live a lie into his adult professional life, but in his personal life the balance is more difficult, and not all ghosts can be left in the past, no matter how much he may want them to be. For many years he will keep to himself as much as possible, the personification of the “present absentee.” That is, until he meets Dalia, the young woman who turns his world upside down when he is in his mid-forties, the woman who finally makes him believe in love. But we know, for he has often told us, that it will not last.

Although familiarity with the first volume is assumed, Star of the Sea is building on a much wider story with a fresh angle on questions about what it means to write about one’s own life, about truth, and about what one can really tell. Given his reluctance to talk about his past, Adam does not detail his early experiences, nor does he explain things we as readers know about his true origins, facts that he himself was unaware of until much later in life. Here is focused on telling this aspect of his story in a specific manner. Yet, by the time the novel ends he has glossed over much of what will be the most significant romantic relationship of his life, so one can only assume that Dalia will take centre stage in volume three. But where will Adam be standing as he tells this part of his story? The final part of the trilogy only came out in Arabic in 2023, so it seems that Anglophone readers will have to wait for a translation to find out.

Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books.

Memory is a wound in the soul that never heals: Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury

I want to clarify things for myself first. What I write now, and what I shall write, isn’t a novel or an autobiography and it isn’t addressed to anyone. It would be logical not to have it published as a book, but I don’t know. I shall let myself address itself as it desires, without rules, I will not change names to make myself think that I am writing a work of literature, and I shan’t cobble together a framework. I shall tell things as I told them to my young friend.

These are the directives the narrator of the first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto sets for himself as he abandons his past literary ambitions to dedicate himself to his own story. But as he allows memory, investigation, and reflection to guide his pen, he is inadvertently, and unintentionally, moving toward something much grander even if the result, My Name is Adam is presented as an unedited collection of writings never intended for publication. In a post-dated fictional introduction, Khoury claims that these notebooks were passed on to him after the death of Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian born falafel seller living in New York City, by a mutual acquaintance, Sarang Lee, who was the young friend Adam refers to above and a student of Khoury’s. By his own admission, Adam himself was neither a friend nor an admirer of the famed Lebanese novelist. It was his contention that Khoury had “stolen” the stories of his friends and used them to write his epic novel Gate of the Sun which had then been turned into a movie. When Khoury comes to possess Adam’s texts—which include a series of attempted approaches to a novel he had hoped to write, along with an extended autobiographical effort that combines remembered detail with information gathered from a range of sources—his first inclination is to rework the material into a formal novel and pass it off as his own. At the last minute though, he decides to simply send Adam’s writing, as is, to his publisher in Beirut.

The resulting novel is a masterful, unconventional work, and a complex, multilayered meditation on the nature of memory—individual and collective—truth, and the search for meaning. Adam is a man trying to find himself within the history of his family and his own people. Although he is only in his fifties, he has already decided he wants to die, but first he needs to write his own story, not for posterity but for his own ends. He had long dreamed of writing a novel based on the tragic fate of seventh century Yemini poet Waddah al-Yaman, a man driven to a silent death, buried alive for love—an effort preserved in its formative stages in the earliest sections of My Name is Adam. But this task is set aside for his personally directed endeavour as the result of two events: an unexpected meeting with Blind Ma’moun, an important figure from his childhood who reveals an unsettling truth about his parents, and the screening of the film based on Gate of the Sun in which he sees the story of Dalia, a woman he once loved. He realizes that he must reclaim his story, and that of his friends, from the darkness of the past and the distortions of literary accounts.

I don’t like playing games with life. We aren’t heroes of novels that our fates and stories should be played around with like that. I’m not a child and I hate heroes. I’m just a man who has tried to live and has discovered the impossibility of doing so. I’m not saying life has no meaning, because meaning has no meaning and looking for it seems to be boring and trivial. I’m a man who’s lived all his life in the postponed and the temporary.

Yet, to resolve this suspended state, even if he is only writing toward his own death, the tale he will need to address is one that involves loss, historical tragedy, assumed identity, and ultimately, self-imposed exile from his homeland.

The central focus of Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam is the brutal massacre at the city of Lydda in July 1948 and the trials of the months that followed when the remaining Palestinian survivors were forced to live in an area enclosed within barbed wire fences, described, by the Jewish Israeli soldiers guarding them, as the “ghetto.” Adam, thought to be the first child born within this space—hence his unconventional name—was an infant during this period, but he grew up as the child of a honoured martyr and carried with him a legacy born of the stories told to him by his mother and many others. Blind Ma’moun’s late revelation shatters the foundations of his identity (even if it was something he was never quite at ease with) and drives him to work his way back to lay bare the details of one of the many horrifying and disturbing incidents that accompanied the forced formation of the new Jewish state. When the IDF moved into Lydda—an ancient town recognized as the martyrdom site of a figure revered by Orthodox Christians and Muslims alike, Saint George or Al-Khadr—hundreds of residents were killed and 50,000 were forcibly displaced. But, that is just the beginning, Adam knows, recalling, Blind Ma’moun’s powerful New York University lecture some fifty years or so after the massacre:

“I shall not fall into the trap of saying that the Nakba was a unique historical event. History, ancient and modern, is a series of catastrophes afflicting numerous peoples. I might tell you the story of the corpses we had to collect from the alleyways, fields, and houses of Lydda, or I might tell you about the men who were executed in al-Tantoura and how the soldiers of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade ordered the Palestinian men of the village to dig their own graves using their hands—but what benefit would there be in that? The issue isn’t just the crime of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, because a bigger crime followed—the crime of the imposition of silence on an entire people. . . the silence imposed by the victor on the vanquished through the power of the language of the Jewish victim, which dominated the world, meaning the West, following the crimes of the Second World War and the savagery of the Nazi Holocaust. No one listened to the cries of the Palestinians, who died and were dispossessed in silence. This is why literature came to forge a new language for the victim, or in other words to proclaim a literature of silence, and to take us, with Mahmoud Darwish, to ‘wherever the wind blows.’”

As a child of the Nakba, Adam believes that only by going back to his own origins can he hope to make sense of where he comes from and who he is, and begin to understand the relationships and choices that have shaped his life. His autobiographical journey may have started with a cynical attitude toward the notion of “meaning,” but as he fills the pages of his notebooks with memories and research, the more existential questions he asks, of himself and those he loved. It is not just the unspeakable pains his mother endured or the secrets that may have been kept from him that trouble his inquiry, he is also struck by the resilience and resourcefulness of the inhabitants of the Lydda ghetto who are forced to secure their own food and water, and share limited resources and accommodation. He wonders at the human capacity to keep living against the odds.

Because this a work that evokes the often unstructured gathering and reworking of remembered elements, “derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory,” Adam’s narrative is one that tends to circle back on itself, digging deeper, and going farther with each turn, while bringing up references to aspects of his youth and adult life that he continually places aside as “a story for later.” If that sounds frustrating, it is not, for the momentum is maintained as he pushes closer to a fuller picture of the extent of the massacre, the deprivation that ensued, and the deeply buried scars borne by those who survived. And, of course, in light of the current situation in Gaza, the parallels are clear even though, in 1948, the displaced still had a place to go and the escaped had a place to run to.

My Name is Adam is an imaginative, prescient novel that lives within the literary, artistic and historical threads of Palestinian history. Adam is likewise well-versed in Arabic and Israeli literature, while at the same time being aware of himself as both a protagonist and an insecure writer. “Am I merely a story, fashioned out of words?” he asks. He is much more. And his story, beyond his early years in the Lydda ghetto, will cross paths with that of the occupier—he will change his identity and pass as an Israeli Jew (“from the ghetto,” implying Warsaw) for a period of time, revealing his truth only for love. But that is, one would guess, primarily a tale for book two. In the meantime, as he is composing his autobiographical account, in wintery New York City, years after leaving the Middle East, he is writing to reframe a Palestinian identity that goes beyond simply making falafel and other authentic dishes. He is writing, he says, to forget. Perhaps he also is preparing to make peace with the past, but if so, that too awaits the second volume.

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books. Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea will be released in November 2024.