Dancing Arabs
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.55
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Dancing Arabs for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.55, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"[Kashua's] hero does not have a God. He does not threaten with violence, nor does he ask for pity. . . . His life is a masquerade ball, and though he betrays himself, disguises himself, and pours himself from one character to another, he is always honest. And no reader, foreign or local, can remain indifferent to his truth."
Product Description
The debut novel by 28-year-old Arab-Israeli Kashua has been praised around the world for its honesty, irony, humor, and its uniquely human portrayal of a young man who moves between two societies, becoming a stranger to both.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
I was always looking for the keys to the cupboard. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
I was always looking for the keys to the cupboard. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
A compelling read!
27 Sep 2004
Format:Paperback
A young boy, growing up in the Arab village of Tira in Israel's Galilee region, describes life within his family and how it feels to be an Arab living in the overwhelmingly Jewish country of Israel. He gains entrance to a Jewish boarding school and finds it difficult to fit in.
I was afraid to begin this story because I didn't want to read a book filled with Arab hatred for Jews. My hope in choosing this book was to get beyond the tragedy of the current political and socioeconomic situation in Israel and truly see an Arab as he lives in Israel. I was soon captured by this young boy's story. It was so interesting and full of such vivid detail that I felt as if I were reading an autobiography rather than a novel, much in the same vein as I felt reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.
The story is sad because it reveals grimmer aspects of Arab-Jewish relations, but it also offers a glimmer of hope (much in the way that the Seeds of Peace did), that an important way to peace is through being open to learn about someone different. The words of this novel are simple, but the emotions behind the narrative are far more complex. In conveying those feelings to his readers, the author does a stunning job. The plight and confusion of a man caught between two cultures is so clearly shown.
In a way, it is a depressing story. Nonetheless, I appreciate the fact that the author has provided this insight into the Israeli-Arab culture for the wider world to share. It shows just how difficult it is for an Arab to find a place as a valued member of the country in which the majority of the population is Jewish, and, once he finds a way to co-exist comfortably among Jews, how he finds that he has alienated himself from his own culture.
I was afraid to begin this story because I didn't want to read a book filled with Arab hatred for Jews. My hope in choosing this book was to get beyond the tragedy of the current political and socioeconomic situation in Israel and truly see an Arab as he lives in Israel. I was soon captured by this young boy's story. It was so interesting and full of such vivid detail that I felt as if I were reading an autobiography rather than a novel, much in the same vein as I felt reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.
The story is sad because it reveals grimmer aspects of Arab-Jewish relations, but it also offers a glimmer of hope (much in the way that the Seeds of Peace did), that an important way to peace is through being open to learn about someone different. The words of this novel are simple, but the emotions behind the narrative are far more complex. In conveying those feelings to his readers, the author does a stunning job. The plight and confusion of a man caught between two cultures is so clearly shown.
In a way, it is a depressing story. Nonetheless, I appreciate the fact that the author has provided this insight into the Israeli-Arab culture for the wider world to share. It shows just how difficult it is for an Arab to find a place as a valued member of the country in which the majority of the population is Jewish, and, once he finds a way to co-exist comfortably among Jews, how he finds that he has alienated himself from his own culture.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Comic-gloomy vision . . .
7 Dec 2009
Format:Paperback
This is a well-written, sometimes entertaining, and finally dispiriting book about identity loss. While the international news media may characterize Palestinians as either oppressed or villainous, depending on the political agendas of others, Kashua's portrayal of this novel's Palestinian-Israeli protagonist forgoes the usual stereotypes. His central character is both sympathetic and pathetic by turns.
Carrying a blue identity card, which makes him an Israeli citizen, the novel's narrator tells of his childhood in a village, Tira, which lies north of Tel Aviv, where he learns early a kind of self-contempt that sets him on a path of disillusionment with nearly everything. Given the opportunity to get an education at a Jewish boarding school, which would then open doors into a comfortable professional life, he blames himself for losing the courage to follow that path - though the seeds of his failure had already been planted long ago in his rejection of his ethnicity and his desire to pass for Jewish. Marrying a Muslim girl he meets in Jerusalem, he finds his miseries compounded. Meanwhile, hostilities and tensions mount around him, as wars and rebellion break out again - the Lebanese War, the Gulf War, and the Intafada.
There is dignity left only in clinging to the land, as his aging grandmother has done from the beginning of the novel, refusing to relinquish the patch of it left to her by her dead husband. Given the futility of forging an identity for himself, the narrator can still claim this one consistency in his life, that he has remained devoted to this old woman and is still tenderly caring for her in the closing scene. It permits what has been a comic-gloomy vision to end on a note that is not without a slender thread of hope.
Carrying a blue identity card, which makes him an Israeli citizen, the novel's narrator tells of his childhood in a village, Tira, which lies north of Tel Aviv, where he learns early a kind of self-contempt that sets him on a path of disillusionment with nearly everything. Given the opportunity to get an education at a Jewish boarding school, which would then open doors into a comfortable professional life, he blames himself for losing the courage to follow that path - though the seeds of his failure had already been planted long ago in his rejection of his ethnicity and his desire to pass for Jewish. Marrying a Muslim girl he meets in Jerusalem, he finds his miseries compounded. Meanwhile, hostilities and tensions mount around him, as wars and rebellion break out again - the Lebanese War, the Gulf War, and the Intafada.
There is dignity left only in clinging to the land, as his aging grandmother has done from the beginning of the novel, refusing to relinquish the patch of it left to her by her dead husband. Given the futility of forging an identity for himself, the narrator can still claim this one consistency in his life, that he has remained devoted to this old woman and is still tenderly caring for her in the closing scene. It permits what has been a comic-gloomy vision to end on a note that is not without a slender thread of hope.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Interesting View of Israel
8 Sep 2004
Format:Paperback
I found this book extremely well-written and a good examination of the clash of cultures that occurs for young people growing up in the Palestinian areas of Israel. The book examines the life of an anonymous boy/man throughout his life in short sketches describing events that occur to him. The only problem I had with the book is the main character eventually degenerates into a whiny, unmotivated blob that wishes for great things but never takes the initiative to make them happen. Overall, I would recommend this book.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
