Verses of Forgiveness: A Novel - Hardcover

Antaki, Myriam; De Jager, Marjolijn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590510380 ISBN 13: 9781590510384

Publisher: Other Pr Llc, 2002

Synopsis

Verses of Forgiveness, the story of a Palestinian suicide bomber awaiting his hour of death, opens with the proclamation, "I am a terrorist, a dreamer."
While Ahmed prepares an attack on the heart of Israel, the mother he never knew finds him languishing in a brothel. She reveals that his father was a Jew who survived the Holocaust and fled to the Promised Land. There he joined the Zionist terrorist group, Irgun. At the moment of the conception of the state of Israel, Ahmed's Jewish father and Christian mother consummated their love.
Ahmed tells his father's story and we revisit with him day by day, smell by smell, through the early stages of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the fundamental absurdity of a war built on ashes and political mistakes. Through her use of poetic language, Myriam Antaki makes beauty the ambassador of unnecessary violence and hatred.

About this title

From Library Journal:

The narrator of this slender, poetic novel is Ahmed, a Palestinian terrorist. As he awaits death in an Israeli prison cell, Ahmed learns of the parents he never knew. His mother, Marie, was a Palestinian Arab Christian; his father, David, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who became a terrorist in the Israeli War of Independence. When Ahmed reads his father's journal, he discovers the tragedies that made his father a terrorist. He also reads a letter from Marie describing his birth and how his grandmother forced her to abandon him immediately in a Lebanese Palestinian refugee camp. As Antaki, a Syrian Christian, describes historical events that turned neighbors into enemies and led irrevocably to a never-ending war, she makes a plea for understanding, forgiveness, and a way of life in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews can live together without the violence that those events have perpetuated. Readers will either love or hate this novel, depending on their politics, and some may find Antaki's lyrical style a challenge. Purchase for larger international fiction collections. [This is Antaki's first novel to be translated into English.-Ed.]-Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, K.
--Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Pr Llc
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1590510380
• ISBN 13: 9781590510384
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176