Arabesques
by Anton Shammas (Barnard Book Club).“Arabesques is a classic, complex novel of identity, memory, and history in the Middle East and points beyond. Anton Shammas chronicles his life as an Israeli Christian Arab, dramatizing the bitter clash of traditions in a village on the Galilee just after 1948 and his search for personal identity, which leads through Paris to its climax in Iowa City.Anton Shammas, the first Arab to write a novel in Hebrew, has given us a riveting look at a people we hear too little about: Palestinian Christians. Arabesques was chosen as one of the best books of 1988 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.”
