Who wins the diversity challenge?

"The Israelis", by journalist Donna Rosenthal, is a terrific read, each chapter devoted to a different group in Israel - the Ashkenazi, the Bedoin, the Mizrahi, the Arabs, the Christians, the Druze, the Ultra-Orthodox, and more.  Who would have thought that the Jewish nation of Israel would contain such insular and varied groups, each with its own customs and agenda? The book reads easily, like an extended newspaper feature, and is enlivened by many interviews with ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives amidst the social and political challenges. Chapters address the army, social and sexual norms and more, filling out the picture of life there.

I could not put this book down. Ultimately, it provides a vastly better understanding of the challenges facing Israel from within as well as from its neighbors, challenges which seem overwhelming.  Highly recommended.

Two Families, one home

The Lemon Tree, written by Sandy Tolan in 2007, traces 2 real families' personal experiences on opposite sides of the Palestinian/Israeli divide. Based entirely on interviews and primary sources including archives and diaries , it imagines nothing which has not been documented.

The Khairi family of Palestinian Arabs were displaced in 1948 after the Israeli/Arab war leading to the independence of Israel from the house they had built in the village of al-Ramla many years before. The Eshkanazi family, refugees from Bulgaria, moved into the vacant house and raised their daughter there, while the Khairis dreamed of returning. The book recounts how the grown children of each family develop a relationship spanning many years after Bashir Khairi comes knocking on the door. They come to respect one another and try hard to understand the other's point of view, but ultimately cannot agree.

It is painful to watch the Khairis' longing to return, with Bashir spending years in prison for his activities. Here in the US home is often portable; we move, settle in new places, build lives there. The Lemon Tree gives us a window into a culture and circumstance where this seems impossible.

There is so much more here, detail about political developments which provide the background needed to understand the unfolding of events. It's a sad recounting of the micro effects of larger changes.

The Long Journey

This is the first of three non-fiction or historical fiction books I'll be blogging about the history of the Holy Land. First I revisited James Michener's "The Source", published in 1965, more than 1000 pages. Using the device of explaining artifacts from different eras unearthed at an archeological dig in Israel, Michener moves through time. He starts about 3500 BCE with cave dwellers, tracing the birth of religious feelings and ritual along with the evolution of agrarian societies. Every few decades or centuries we visit the area again to see a somewhat changed way of life. The constants are many: people of different religions trying to co-exist (or not), and conquerers blasting through massacring multitudes. The area is controlled successively by Jews, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans and British.

My interest certainly picked up as it reached the more familiar Greek and Roman times. Historical figures pop up, often in unexpected contexts, adding a human dimension to the general carnage.

Reading this years ago, I recall being discouraged about human nature, with all the killing again and again. The book evoked the same sentiment this time. But it's a valuable aid to understanding the history of the area.

Exiles

Should I read this book? I often have trouble deciding that. In this case, the arguments in favor included that fact that the author was the 2008 Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. On the other hand, I'd never heard of him. Not really surprising - I've never heard of several of the recent Literature prize winners: Herta Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertész, just to name a few. The Nobel Committee has been accused of becoming too Eurocentric and increasingly esoteric.

Also, I'm always hesitant to read a novel in translation because you are at the mercy of the translator. Am I really experiencing the prose as the author intended it, or is the translation too literal or badly mangled? But the book had been recommended to me so I forged ahead.

Wandering Star tells the coming of age story of two young girls. The first is Esther, a secular Jewish girl who is forced to leave her French mountain village in the waning days of World War II in order to escape the Germans. Eventually she and her mother reach the newly established state of Israel. The second is Nejma, an orphaned Palestinian girl, who is displaced by the partitioning of her country. The girls encounter each other for only one brief moment on a road, as Esther and her fellow refugees are moving toward Jerusalem, and Nejma is moving away from it.

The story Le Clézio tells has nothing to do with politics. He describes in simple prose these two 'wandering stars', young women searching for peace and acceptance in the midst of war and profound human misery. The book's dedication - “To the captured children” - expresses his empathy for both his characters.   In the midst of fear and deprivation each is still able to appreciate the beauties of nature and each remains open to love and human kindness.