Sharon and My Mother-in-Law
Ramallah Diaries
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4.6 • 12 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Based on diaries and email correspondence that she kept from 1981-2004, here Suad Amiry evokes daily life in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
"A literary protest done with great wit, skill, and passion. Not only is it really funny but it shows the kind of courage, vision, and humanity needed to bring peace to the Middle East." —Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues
Capturing the frustrations, cabin fever, and downright misery of her experiences, Amiry writes with elegance and humor about the enormous difficulty of moving from one place to another, the torture of falling in love with someone from another town, the absurdity of her dog receiving a Jerusalem identity card when thousands of Palestinians could not, and the trials of having her ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law living in her house during a forty-two-day curfew. With a wickedly sharp ear for dialogue and a keen eye for detail, Amiry gives us an original, ironic, and firsthand glimpse into the absurdity—and agony—of life in the Occupied Territories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Amiry's parents were among the thousands of Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948; they went to Amman, Jordan, where the author was brought up before attending the American University in Beirut to study architecture. She returned to Ramallah as a tourist in 1981, but then she met Salim Tamari, fell in love, married him and returned to the city, now heavily occupied by Israeli troops. This book is an attempt to illustrate the life of a middle-class, Westernized woman in an occupied territory: the daily anxieties and struggles with curfews, roadblocks, barricades, body searches, gunfire, endless red tape, discourtesy and general harassment not to mention the less than peaceful presence of a mother-in-law taken in for safety's sake. The account, often surprisingly good-humored (as when Amiry realizes her dog has a Jerusalem passport though she does not), is vivid but somewhat sketchily based on diaries and e-mails; it gains in immediacy and relevance to current newspaper accounts what it may lack in comprehensiveness. The book was awarded Italy's Viareggio Virsilia Prize, and while the writing is unremarkable, the work serves as an important report from the front.
Customer Reviews
Mrs.
Excellent read. I felt I was walking down "Yafa" with you. I share your feelings, I too heard a lot about it from my Yafawi parents. I was moved by the widowed lioness conversation.
Thank you for shedding light on this period.
Wafa'