Khoury, Elias

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    Book Review: ‘Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea,’ by Elias Khoury

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    Elias Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” series continues with a young man switching identities in a society seeking to erase him.CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO: Star of the Sea, by Elias Khoury. Translated by Humphrey Davies.“The beginning of life was the massacre and I have to gather together the scraps of its stories.”The speaker here is Adam Dannoun, the hero of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s final work, the epic trilogy “Children of the Ghetto.” (Khoury died at 76 in Beirut on Sept. 15, shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.)Adam, who was a small child in the first volume, “My Name Is Adam” (2019), now appears as a teenager and young man in the second novel, “Star of the Sea.” The massacre Adam is referring to took place in 1948, inside what is now Israel. But this event is impossible to separate from today’s massacres in Gaza, or from the other crises — the mass expulsions, land thefts, imprisonment, historical appropriation and erasure — that constitute what Palestinians call the ongoing Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of their existence under occupation and in exile. The massacre is also, Khoury insists, impossible to separate from the Holocaust, the pogroms and the history of Jewish suffering that led to the creation of Israel.“Catastrophes,” Adam says bitterly, reflecting on his own experience within this hall of mirrors, “however tragic they may be, liberate their victims from the truth and drive them to find a justification for everything.”Adam has no choice about his own “liberation.” The son of a fallen resistance fighter, Hasan Dannoun, he’s rescued as a baby from the arms of his dead mother during the expulsion of Palestinians from the town of Lydda, in July 1948. He grows up with a foster mother, Manal, among the few Palestinians allowed to remain in a tiny quarter of the town, a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire.Seven years later, Manal marries an abusive man who takes them to live a safer, if still impoverished, life in an Arab enclave in Haifa. As soon as he’s able, Adam escapes the home, and immediately encounters a strange new reality. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, he can effortlessly pass as a Jewish Israeli. In nearly every way, it’s easier for him to become one.“Children of the Ghetto” is a picaresque, though one without comic intentions: Like Tom Jones or David Copperfield, Adam is an orphan and a rogue, a survivor and a trickster, even a bit of a romantic. It’s also about racial shape-shifting, appropriation and invisibility; you could put it on the same shelf with “Passing” and “Invisible Man.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elias Khoury, Master of the Modern Arabic Novel, Dies at 76

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      In his fiction and journalism, he sought to illustrate the story of the contemporary Middle East and his native Lebanon.Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer whose sweeping, intricately rendered tales of postwar life in the Middle East won him praise as one of the greatest modern Arabic novelists, and whose editorial leadership of some of Lebanon’s leading publications made him an arbiter of his country’s turbulent political culture, died on Sunday in Beirut. He was 76.His daughter, Abla Khoury, confirmed the death, in a hospital, adding that her father had been in declining health for several months.Mr. Khoury’s writing, both fiction and journalism, often focused on the twin events that defined his world: the Lebanese civil war, from 1975 to 1990, and the plight of Palestinians after the founding of Israel, particularly the tens of thousands who fled to Lebanon in 1948 and after the Six-Day War of 1967.As a novelist, Mr. Khoury was often compared with the American writer James A. Michener, who in books like “Hawaii” (1959) and “Texas” (1985) attempted to capture epic swaths of history in an intimate narrative.But if his vision was Michenerian, his prose was Faulknerian, driven by interweaving, stream-of-conscious narratives. He also claimed Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino as influences.Mr. Khoury in 2014. His novels often began with a single, sustained encounter before spinning outward, kaleidoscopically, into the past and across borders.Bilal Hussein/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More