The Words of My Father
A Memoir
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In the Gaza Strip, growing up on land owned by his family for centuries, eleven-year-old Yousef is preoccupied by video games, school pranks, and meeting his father’s impossibly high standards. Everything changes when the Second Intifada erupts and soldiers occupy the family home. Yousef’s father refuses to flee and risk losing the house forever, so the army keeps the family in a state of virtual imprisonment. Yousef struggles to understand how his father can be so committed to peaceful co-existence that he welcomes the occupying Israeli soldiers as ‘guests’, even in the face of unfair and humiliating treatment. Over time, Yousef learns how to endure his new life in captivity – but he can’t anticipate that a bullet is about to transform his future in an instant. Shot by an Israeli soldier at the age of fifteen, and taken to hospital in Tel Aviv, Yousef slowly and painstakingly confronts the paralysis of his lower body. Under the ceaseless care of Israeli medical professionals, he gains a new perspective on the value of co-existence. These transformative experiences set Yousef on a difficult new path that leads him to learn to embody his father’s philosophy, and spread a message of co-existence in a world of deep-set sectarianism. The Words of My Father is a moving coming-of-age story about survival, tolerance and hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bashir's candid and deeply felt coming-of-age story unfolds largely during the Second Intifada. Starting when Bashir was 11, Israeli soldiers occupied his family's farm on the Gaza Strip. He led a fairly average adolescent life playing video games and watching soccer while witnessing abuse, such as when soldiers would force his father, a respected school headmaster who advocated for peace with Israel, to submit at gunpoint to a daily strip search. Bashir's father remained a pacifist, even after 15-year-old Bashir was shot by an Israeli soldier from a watchtower outside his house just minutes past curfew. He was left paralyzed from the waist down for a year, and despite his anger, he recognized the complexities of his country: "It was a Jewish soldier who had shot me, but the nurses were also Jewish." Three years later, attending college in Boston, Bashir advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace and later became a member of the Palestinian Diplomatic Delegation to the U.S. Throughout, his father's words resonated: "Violence only leads to more violence." Even in the face of great adversity, Bashir prevails as an optimistic champion of peace, as he eloquently and subtly writes, "all I had to offer this world were my little words about the need for peace." This moving meditation of a young man's struggle to find peace amid turmoil will resonate with readers concerned with Israeli-Palestinian relations.
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