The Way to the Spring
Life and Death in Palestine
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- 20,99 €
Publisher Description
This is a book about Palestine today. It is neither apologetic nor romanticized, but a powerful and brilliantly realized scream of a book, scorching and tender, from a journalist whose anger and empathy burn through every word.
Over the past three years, Ben Ehrenreich has shared the laughter, fury and sorrow of people in cities and villages across the West Bank, young and old people, men and women. He has witnessed the extremes to which they are pushed, the daily deprivation and oppression that they face, the strategies they construct to survive it - stoicism, resignation, rebellion, humour, and a stubborn, defiant joy. In The Way to the Spring, he describes the cruel mechanics of the Israeli occupation and the endless absurdities and tragedies it engenders: the complex and humiliating machinery of the checkpoints, walls, courts and prisons; the steady, strangling loss of lands that have been passed down for generations; the constant ebb and flow of deadly violence.
Blending political and historical context with the personal stories of the people Ehrenreich meets, The Way to the Spring is a testimony, a provocation and a vital document. Written with grace and power, it breathes fresh life and urgency to a place and a conflict that too easily disappears in the shouting. This is a necessary book, an unflinching act of witnessing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Teeming with heartbreak, irony, and intimate moments of joy, this first nonfiction book from journalist and novelist Ehrenreich (Ether) germinated from his 2013 New York Times Magazine cover story entitled (more provocatively) "Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?" For readers perplexed by the Israel-Palestine conflict, he intersperses his story with crash-course history lessons. But the author's real project is to humanize ordinary Palestinians for Americans, capturing the humiliations and indignities bureaucratic, psychological, and physical that they suffer under occupation; their fear, anger, and frustration; and their families and celebrations. He paints a vivid portrait of life in three locations: the village of Nabi Saleh, where families have been protesting weekly for the right to use a spring that was theirs until Israeli settlers claimed it, and are consistently met with force; the city of Hebron, a puzzle box of checkpoints and segregated zones, and a powder keg of Jewish and Palestinian resentments; and the village of Umm al-Kheir, where a way of life is quietly dying in the shadow of ever-expanding settlements. With a journalist's keen eye for detail and a novelist's ardor for language and its ability to move people, Ehrenreich will incite renewed compassion in his readers.
