The Children of the Ghetto: II
Star of the Sea
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
2024 NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Award Finalist
An acclaimed Lebanese writer speaks to the complexity of the Palestinian experience in a devastating account of resilience and loss
Weaving personal and cultural memory into a tale that humanizes the complex Palestinian experience, Star of the Sea traces the contours of the unspeakable.
Adam Dannoun’s story is one of beginnings. Born in a war-torn Israel, Adam dreams of becoming a writer. He is just an infant when Jewish forces uproot and massacre thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, including his own father. Adam’s mother, crumbling with loss, takes her son to Haifa and remarries. Soon she feels stifled by her new husband. Adam flees this lifeless home and writes himself a second beginning. With nothing but his father’s will and the image of his mother at the doorway, Adam is born again into the streets of Haifa.
Here he spins a new life alongside an auto-shop owner, Gabriel. Adam Dannoun shapeshifts into Adam Danon, an Israeli born into the Warsaw ghetto, and Gabriel’s younger brother. There are limits to this charade, lines he’s forbidden to cross—and when he falls in love with Gabriel’s only daughter he steps, unawares, into a third life. Life after life, Adam confronts the horrors of his past.
Following My Name Is Adam, Star of the Sea is the second installment of a brilliant trilogy—an epic tale of love, survival, and ongoing devastation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Palestinian man leads a double life in Israel in Khoury's beautiful and bewitching sequel to My Name Is Adam. The narrative recounts the early years of Adam Dannoun, before he became the New York City falafel seller portrayed in the first book. Born in Lydda in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he's 15 when he leaves his mother's house in Haifa. He leads a peripatetic life over the next few years, working at a Jewish mechanic's garage and a Palestinian woman's bakery until he begins studying Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa and finds in the subject a "mirror for his soul." At the university, Adam, who is fair-skinned, changes his last name to Danon and assumes a Jewish identity. Over the subsequent decades, he tries to transform himself "into a man of many faces, origin unknown," until he's unwittingly implicated in an act of political violence. In lyrical and philosophical prose, Khoury masterfully depicts Adam's ambivalence about his origins ("If you had asked Adam to tell you his mother's story, he would have written pages and pages in white ink. That's how he always imagined himself—writing white on white, rather than writing and then erasing the way writers do"). The result is a poignant and deeply humane exploration of Palestinian identity.
