Dancing Arabs - by Sayed Kashua (Paperback)

About the Book

The debut novel by 28-year-old Arab-Israeli Kashua has been praised around the world for its honesty, irony, humor, and its uniquely human portrayal of a young man who moves between two societies, becoming a stranger to both.

Book Synopsis

The debut novel by twenty-eight-year-old Arab-Israeli Sayed Kashua has been praised around the world for its honesty, irony, humor, and its uniquely human portrayal of a young man who moves between two societies, becoming a stranger to both. Kashua's nameless antihero has big shoes to fill, having grown up with the myth of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and with a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs brilliantly maps one man's struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both.

Review Quotes

"[Kashua's] hero does not have a God. He does not threaten with violence, nor does he ask for pity. . . . His life is a masquerade ball, and though he betrays himself, disguises himself, and pours himself from one character to another, he is always honest. And no reader, foreign or local, can remain indifferent to his truth."

About the Author

Sayed Kashua was born in 1975 in Tira, and went on to study in a boarding school in Jerusalem and at Hebrew University. He lives in an Arab village near Jerusalem with his wife and daughter and works as a journalist. Until recently he had a column in Kol Ha'ir, Jerusalem's most important cultural magazine. An Arab who writes in Hebrew, he has a complicated relationship to his family and history and this project has not endeared him to his village or his people. Like the narrator/anti-hero he has alienated most people in his life, is largely barred from Israel's dominant society, and yet he remains bound to this volatile land.

Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger