Book Description | Adam Dannoun came to New York to escape a love affair that foundered in the psychological devastation caused by the occupation. He works in a falafel restaurant and settles down to write a novel which tells the love story of Waddah Al-Yaman, a famous Arab poet of the Umayyad period. His writing leads him to tell the stories of his childhood in the ghetto that the Israeli army, after expelling most of the inhabitants of Lydda, built in 1948 for the small number who remained in the city. Literature merges with reality throughout his evocation of these memories. The literary characters of the novels of Ghassan Kanafani, Amos Oz and Elias Khoury become real characters, and his account of the drama lived in the Palestinian ghetto merge with the narrator's attempts to free himself from his own kidnapped identity, as he at last learns the terrible truth about his past. |