The Children of the Ghetto - My Name is Adam

Review

I have had this book on my living room table for months. Originally, it was to by my book club’s January read, but scheduling and then supply issues pushed it out months and months. The whole time I eyed it warily for its weight and size. I’ve been in a mood of 200-300 page books, and I had no concept of what this would be about, only that it was surprisingly dense to lift. The last book I read from Archipelago Press was Sara Gallardo’s January which is a tiny thing.

When I began this, I felt worried as I struggled a little with the framing. That the author is named as a character started to break, for me, my understanding of this work as fiction or non-fiction, and just how ‘meta’ it might be. It didn’t take long for this concern to fade away as the stories of emotional and mnemonic wounds (this word, mnemonic, is technically correct but feels too mathematical or clinical, I want to use the word ‘memorical’ which does not exist, but if I created it for this review, surely, the reader would understand) stood starkly on their own.

The opening eventually delves into an extensive telling of Waddah al-Yaman, an Arab poet from the 7th century. I quite liked this recounting and the layering of oral tale / history / story. It very much sets the tone for the rest of the book, though in a way I could not appreciate until about the last hundred pages.

Khoury takes us into memory and we find it hostile and full of sorrow. Our protagonist, who claims to hate nostalgia and wishes he could shred his memory, nonetheless seeks out others to hear their memories. He resents the word “trauma” and also resents the comparison of the events at Lydda with other atrocities, which I think seems quite fair enough.

It is probably now time to confront that I know dreadfully little about the history of Palestine and Israel. It is probably a crime that the extent of my knowledge (barring that of recent events) originates from an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and yet that is the truth. Which is not to suggest that I dismiss anything, only to clarify that I am ignorant to details, aware only of tragedy and terror. It is likely that a part of this is a resistance to looking upon things that are hard to behold, uncomfortable to realize and rationalize. Because for terror there is no rationalization. I have not even engaged in this enough to provide excuses for any party or rationalizations or anything of the sort. It’s possible I’ve intentionally avoided knowledge on the subject, which might make me a bad person.

There is a passage in the book where Adam speaks to a researcher and there is a disagreement on what truth means. For the researcher, truth is hard documentation. Adam cannot accept this because, for his people and his life, there is no ‘objective’ hard documentation. To accept the documentation at face value is to accept a depiction of some other event, but not that of his life, it would not be true. That is perhaps how I am seeing this book. Whether it is “fiction” or “non-fiction” is probably irrelevant insofar as it does ring true, and I have no doubt that the terrors experienced by real people share strands or whole cloth with the depictions in this book.

I googled Lydda as a result of reading this, in conjunction with the book’s title, and one of the first results is an article stating that the massacre referenced in the book is “fake” - there appear to be a series of essays possibly going back and forth, but they are account-walled. I admit when I see things like this, I feel my ignorance screaming out from my head that I should probably avoid this whole thing.

Though, there is an aside that truth may or may not matter as far as we should probably agree that the killing of innocent people should be considered a crime. No?

Anyway, I am too stupid and too unqualified to get much into all of that.

The book. At one point I began to get confused because Khoury goes through the same events frequently. Of course, this is the point of the book. Themes of memory, silence, aches, our inability to escape memory, and how it is relived and relived and how little things can differ in the telling and retelling.

It wouldn’t be true to say that I enjoyed reading this. Though, I did find it very “easy” to read in that I kept wanting to pick it up. Some sentences are long and winding – one I counted 79 words – which is usually an allergen to me, and yet I rarely got lost and didn’t get frustrated. I liked the writing style. I did sometimes get lost in names, and often got lost in whose perspective we’re in, whose memory, whose telling, etc. Though, I think that is probably intentional.

Perhaps more to say after my book club discussion.

Notes

• p33 - I don’t feel comfortable with messages in literature. Literature is like love: it loses its meaning when turned into a medium for something else that goes beyond it, because nothing goes beyond love, and nothing has more meaning than the stirrings of the human soul whose pulse is to be felt in literature.
• p35 - What is love? And how can passion so overwhelm us that we become its plaything and go to our fate unresisting?
• p38 - I knew love is the art of waiting, had practiced that art throughout the years of my relationship… was prepared to do so again and enter the worlds of patience and latency, but I suddenly felt, as I sipped my early-morning coffee and dreamed of a cold shower to remove the traces of the humid night from my eyes and body, that I was mediocre and empty and that I would never love the woman again, or want to wait for her.
• p59 - This is the delusion and the weakness of power, for immortality is a delusion of the living, not a concern of the dead, albeit the living can read their inevitable deaths only within the framework of what they can grasp rationally.
• p80 - Said the chronicler: “The lovers never spoke of that sad night. The queen commanded him to forget. She said forgetfulness was the cure for those who could not control their lives. She said she feared for him and for herself.” (TB: emphasis mine)
• p141 - Like all Palestinians, who lost everything when they lost their homeland, I throw away nothing connected to our fugitive memory, for we are slaves to that memory. … Memory is a wound in the soul that never closes. You have to learn to live with its pus, oozing from its open sores.
• p149 - 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 me broing and trivial.
• p151 - Manal couldn’t find anyone to take revenge on, so she took revenge on herself. (TB: this is phenomenal)
• ==(H)== p170 - People talk of fear as though it were an individual experience. They speak of knees giving way, of the void within the heart, of annihilation. But it is the fear that turns into waves that is the greatest - the fear that undulates through thousands who have been cast into the wilderness beneath the lead of bullets and among the faces of soldiers gloating at their misfortune, soldiers scattered along the length of the rocky road who take everything the stream of fugitives possesses by way of money and jewelry and gaze at the wandering throngs with indifference. (TB: 73 words in the last sentence!! And yet it doesn’t feel wrong.)
• ==(H)== p197 - I didn’t tell him that his desired refuge was the very cause of my anger, that I had to rid myself of the warmth of memory because it made me feel as though my skin was itching, and that I’d like to rip my memory to pieces so that I could climb out of its cocoon and look toward the future.
• p218 - “The story doesn’t lie in the killing, or in the bodies of the victims, or in the svagery that etched itself on the faces of the killers, shone under the flares fired by the Israeli army; the memory of pain, Doctor, is death by humiliation. Imagine us dancing – yes, dancing – while we were being killed, and that I danced and was killed but didn’t die. The bullet failed to kill me because ‘the General’ … was busy issuing orders to the bulldozer that was working at digging a mass grave and didn’t notice that I’d only been wounded in the shoulde,r and that my death was just a ruse. I lay down among the corpses, to conceal my life under the others’ deaths.” (TB: italics in original.)
• p246 - “We had to learn, my son, to live at the mercy of memory, which, when it wakes, is like a raging wind that breaks our souls into little pieces and rips our bodies apart.”
• p306 - “Not us, I swear! We couldn’t weep because the tears in our eyes had dried up.. They disappeared because there was no medicine for the pain we were living. Tears, my dear, are a medicine, like olive oil. We rub the body with oil and the soul with tears.”
• p352 - Only those who yearn can understand how longing splits their souls in two and casts them into loneliness.
• p393 - The eaten-away face of the young girl became imprinted on my heart and has reamined with me throughout my life. This is what people are. People are cadavers. Even children who look like angels are cadavers. Screw life and screw humankind!
• p423 -

 Then that age and its people were done as though both it and they were dreams.