by Ibtisam Azem (Palestine/USA)

Syracuse University Press; Translation Edition (2019)
242 pages
ISBN-10 : ‎ 0815611110
ISBN-13‏ : ‎ 978-0815611110

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react?

These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty-eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these 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 displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland.

Ariel’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 question.

About the author

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist, born in Taybeh, near Jaffa. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Azem has authored several novels, including “The Book of Disappearance,” which was translated from Arabic into English by Sinan Antoon. Azem currently resides in New York City, where she works as a senior correspondent and co-host of “Arab Voices” at the Arabic-language channel, Al-Araby TV.

Buy this book via your neighborhood English bookstore in Germany.