Sasha Frere-Jones
The late Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s trilogy about a Palestinian refugee during and after the Nakba in 1948 explores the entangled relationship between trauma and storytelling.
Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies, Archipelago, 417 pages, $24
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The great Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury died in September, at age seventy-six, after a lifetime of advocating for the Palestinian cause (briefly, as part of Fatah). “I did not write about the Palestinians,” he told scholar Bilal Orfali in 2018. “I wrote with the Palestinians.” How that is expressed in his novels is distinctly different from his political speeches and essays, several of which are collected in his last book, The Ongoing Nakba, released in November 2023 (but not yet translated). The second volume of his Children of the Ghetto trilogy, Star of the Sea, is now being published in English, in yet another fluid translation by the late Humphrey Davies, one of Khoury’s most important collaborators. Along with Gate of the Sun (which appeared in Arabic in 1998), Children of the Ghetto represents Khoury’s project to tell the stories of displaced Palestinians, “to make silence speak,” as he put it.
Outside his fiction, Khoury was politically consistent. As he said to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in 2022, speaking of the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah, “only real resistance can reunite the Palestinian people.” He called the Nakba “an ongoing process” on several occasions, summing up acutely for Pappe: “The Holocaust happened. The Nakba is happening.” Khoury adamantly refused to bring his novels into what he called “the slippery slope of allegory,” as he described the literature of Palestinian author and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. Stories were Khoury’s obsession, not just in the obvious sense of how fiction works, but as the topic. Characters lie, are accused of lying, and, most characteristic of both Gate of the Sun and Children of the Ghetto, stories start and stop in the most unpredictable order. Khoury, more than many, wrote in the manner of long speeches made at a slightly drunken dinner, with a softness of tone and rhythm and sense. Generosity is necessary across the board.
In Gate of the Sun, a Palestinian resistance fighter, Yunes, has lapsed into a coma and is attended to by a nurse named Khalil who channels and rebroadcasts the fighter’s memories and journeys through countries and prisons and struggles. The book was drawn, in large part, from interviews Khoury did in refugee camps. Children of the Ghetto, on the other hand, in its concentrated atomic spray, is tied to one place, Lydda, site of one of the worst massacres of the Nakba in 1948. As Khoury explained in interviews, when several hundred of Lydda’s remaining residents were grouped by Israeli soldiers into a small area and told it was “the ghetto,” they assumed the word meant “the Arab neighborhood,” as they had never heard the term. This one event planted a seed of language for Khoury and his main character in the trilogy, Adam Dannoun, or Adam Danon, as he makes himself when he decides to pass as Israeli.
Forgive the longish introduction, but it is in keeping with Khoury’s methods—the first volume of Children of the Ghetto, My Name is Adam (2018, also Davies’s translation), doesn’t even get into the meat of Adam’s story until a very long inquiry into the life of poet Waddah al-Yaman. In fact, this second volume is a better place to start with the narrative, and, despite the operational challenges, I love the universe Khoury built from existing worlds. Some of that difficulty seems to reflect what Khoury found when he interviewed people who had survived the Nakba—that they were unwilling or unable to even tell their stories. The circular, aleatory feeling of these books is both a motion that mimics that of a refugee and the sensation produced by psychoanalysis, where the most acute information lies years into the course of the couch work.
Piecing anything together here takes time, and the impatient reader will be permanently frustrated. Born in Lydda in 1948, Adam ends up in Haifa with his mother, Manal, after she leaves Adam’s father, Hasan, to marry a man named Abdallah al-Ashhal, who is abusive to both mother and son. Adam leaves home when still a teenager and gets a job in a garage, where his lie begins. The garage owner, a Polish Jew named Gabriel, only indirectly facilitates the lie: “Adam adopted the following story: he was Gabriel’s younger brother and had escaped the Warsaw ghetto with their mother and become someone new here.”
Adam is an antihero in the truest sense, and also not entirely the point of the trilogy he holds together. His story takes him through Warsaw and back to Haifa and to New York, which is only part of what Star of the Sea does. This trilogy makes sense as Khoury’s final work if you see the topic not as the fate of Palestinians, about which he is much clearer elsewhere, but as trauma and how it shapes the functions of stories. Early on, Adam begins to have theories about “why his mother spoke the way she did, breaking her sentences into pieces rather than assembling them.” He calls it “waiting, a third form of waiting: waiting for nothing.” The profound is interspersed with the aggressively demystifying—Adam’s own shifting of identities is depoliticized, at least in his own mind. He becomes Adam Danon because of “a curiosity born of fatigue and whose raison d’être was the game.” Exile, to Adam, is an asocial state because “deep down, he was aware that he was a stranger, even to his own mother.”
When Adam goes on a class trip to Warsaw, he meets an alleged hero of the ghetto uprising, Marek Edelman. Edelman is a doctor who “never stops drinking vodka” and doesn’t want to tell war stories. Instead, he tells them that “they should be looking for the nobility of the victims—and not fictionalized acts of heroism,” a judgment that could be levied against anybody in this narrative. I am looking forward to the final volume of Children of the Ghetto not because there will be any additional plot points or revelations but rather because the existing installments have given me an irrational amount of pleasure, upon rereading, the long spirals of Khoury’s voice telling me things it seems like I’d never heard before or simply didn’t believe until they were said over and over.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).