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The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem. Syracuse. 2019. Syracuse University Press. 9780815611110. Translated by Sinan Antoon. Middle East Literature In Translation. 240 pages. paperback.  

9780815611110DESCRIPTION - What if all the Arabs in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are poised in Ibtisam Azem's powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv 48 hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished. The story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian boy who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind after his disappearance, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling the understand the traumatic event. Through these alternating perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel's project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's memories of being evicted from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Arial's search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians, revealing a great deal about the fissures at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Sinan Antoon's translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.

Azem IbtisamAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist. She has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleep Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), both by Dar al-Jamal (Beirut/Baghdad). The Book of Disappearance is currently being translated into English, French, and Hebrew. She was born and raised in Taybeh, northern Jaffa, and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at Freiburg University in Germany, where she completed an MA in German and English Literature, and Islamic Studies. She works as senior correspondent in New York for the Arabic daily al-Araby al-Jadeed. She is also co-editor at Jadaliyya e-zine and editor of the Arabic page. She is currently working on an MA at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator, and scholar. He is associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 National Translation Award.

 

 

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