The Children of the Ghetto: I - by Elias Khoury (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published in the Arabic language as Awlad al-ghittu, Ismi Adam by Dar al-Adab, Beirut, 2012"--Copyright page.

Book Synopsis

Lit by the sublime beauty and tragedy of classical Arabic poetry, a Palestinian falafel seller in New York sets out to shape fragments of his family history

Weaving history, memory, and poetry, this unforgettable novel--and the 1st book in a trilogy--provides a sprawling memorial to the Nakba and the strangled lives left in its wake.

Long exiled in New York, Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun thought he knew himself. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changes everything. It is when Adam encounters his former teacher that Adam discovers the story he must tell.

Ma'moun's testimony brings Adam back to the first years of his life in the ghetto of Lydia, in Palestine, where his family endured thirst, hunger, and terror in the aftermath of unspeakable horror.

With unmatched literary craft and empathy, Khoury peels away layers of lost stories and repressed memories to unveil Adam's story.

Oscillating between two narrators--the self-reflexive "Elias Khoury" and Adam himself--Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam engages real (and invented) scholarly texts, Khoury's own work, and Adam's lost notebooks in an intertextual account of a life shadowed by atrocity.

Review Quotes

"Khoury engages his own oeuvre in playful metafictional ways, along with real and invented scholarly texts, and larger Palestinian and Israeli literary histories to which this book is a timely and essential contribution. He rejects didacticism -- "My story isn't an attempt to prove something" -- pirouetting between saying and unsaying, creating a mass of competing meanings from which Adam's tormented psychology emerges. If Khoury makes any argument, however, it is that the expression of an "unadorned truth" is impossible, since all language is symbolic and metaphoric; words are weighed down by their histories... Khoury gives us a vivid glimpse of the unspeakable." -- New York Times Book Review

"Khoury insists that it is impossible to separate the stories of Palestinian and Jewish victimization, but his efforts to accompany the silence of the victims with their stories provide a generous and expansive terrain to think of histories of violence, of their remnants in the present, and of the complexities of survival." -- World Literature Today

"For Khoury, who was born in 1948 and whose life has been marked by almost continuous war, My Name is Adam marks the achievement of a long-held wish, dating back to his work as a member of Fatah in the late sixties and early seventies, to write a great epic about the Nakba ... (Khoury) listen(s) to the way that Palestinians have lived with the history of catastrophe, not by creating alternative narratives, but by cultivating silence and secrecy, shoring up fragments against their ruin." -- Asymptote

"My Name is Adam is an imaginative, prescient novel that lives within the literary, artistic and historical threads of Palestinian history." --Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts

"My Name is Adam is framed as the notebooks of Palestinian writer Adam Dannoun . . . Each of the chapters from the unfinished novel are subtitled 'Point of Entry, ' an echo of the process of writing a novel, or of creating an identity, or of navigating the many checkpoints in a segregated and securitized Palestine . . . The other notebooks are Adam's personal account . . . Adam gathers stories from the community, peeling back layers of stifled memory. These sections feel more urgent and self-assured . . . narratively messier, darker, and more ambiguous." -- James Folta, "A Small Press Book We Love," Literary Hub

Praise for Elias Khoury:

"There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion. In Humphrey Davies' sparely poetic translation, Gate of the Sun is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork." -- New York Times Book Review

"Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world." -- Washington Post Book World

"Elias Khoury is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages." -- Edward W. Said

"We need the voice of Elias Khoury--detailed, exquisite, humane--more than ever. Read him." -- Naomi Shihab Nye

"A writer of panoramic scope and ambition." -- Azadeh Moaveni, Financial Times

About the Author

Elias Khoury (1948-2024) was a novelist, journalist, playwright, and lifelong activist for social justice. His novel Gate of the Sun, called 'a genuine masterwork' by the New York Times, was named Best Book of the Year by Le Monde Diplomatique, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Christian Science Monitor. Also available through Archipelago: Yalo, As Though She Were Sleeping (winner of France's Arabic Novel Prize), Broken Mirrors, and White Masks.

Humphrey Davies is a translator of Arabic fiction, historical, and classical texts. His translations include Elias Khoury's Yalo, Naguid Mahfouz's Thebes at War and Midaqq Alley, Alla Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building and Friendly Fire, Hamdy el-Gazzar's Black Magic, Mohamed Mustagab's Tales of Dayrut, and the four-volume 19th century Arabic experimental novel, Leg over Leg, by Faris Al-Shidyaq. A two-time winner of the Banipal Prize, he is also the recipient of the English PEN Writers In Translation Award. Davies lives in Cairo.