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Short Fiction as a Mirror of Palestinian Life in Israel, 1944–1967

Critique and Anthology

by Jamal Assadi (Author) Saif Abu Saleh (Author)
©2017 Monographs XII, 184 Pages

Summary

This volume seeks to document the development of the Palestinian short story between 1944 and 1967. This particularly significant phase that carried the seeds, from which the short story grew, was greatly influenced by the last years of the British mandate over Palestine in 1944, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent changes that impacted Palestinian society in this country until the Arabs’ defeat in the Six Day War, 1967.
Within the fold of this volume, the reader will find two parts: the first is a general account of the development of the genre of short fiction and the different approaches that characterized it along with a discussion of the language and an examination of the content. The second is an anthology of twenty-five stories published between 1944 and 1967 by Al-Ittiḥād, an Israeli Arabic-language daily newspaper.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author(s)/editor(s)
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Advance Praise for Short Fiction as a Mirror of Palestinian Life in Israel, 1944–1967
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • I. A Critique
  • 1. The Palestinian Short Story: Beginning, Growth and Approaches
  • Beginning
  • The Development of Palestinian Short Story
  • Currents and Trends in the Palestinian Short Story
  • The Romantic Approach
  • The Realistic Approach, Social Realism and the Literature of Ideological Commitment
  • The Symbolic Approach
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 2. Language and Style
  • Bibliography
  • 3. Content: Themes and Motifs
  • The Nakba and Family Reunion
  • Land Confiscation and Judaization
  • Military Rule
  • Military Courts
  • The Role of the Arab Countries
  • The Role of the Communist Party
  • Work, Poverty, Marriage and Other Social Topics
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • II. Anthology
  • 4. “A Scene from Life,” Abu Deeb [pseud.]
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 5. “Um Khalil,” Rashid [pseud.]
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 6. “Dalia: A Story from the Very Bottom of Reality,” Emile Habibie
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 7. “The Victim: Every Day’s Story,” ‘Aref Al-‘Azzounie
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 8. “Crime or Penalty?” Anonymous
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 9. “My Friend, Abu Hassan,” Michael Awad
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 10. “In the Poor Neighborhoods,” Michael Awad
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 11. “Two Hundred Humans Work the Earth, Eat with Flies and Breathe in Disgusting Smells,” Mohammad Khass
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 12. “Long Live Qirqash,” Mohammad Khass
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 13. “We Are from the Dear Land,” Mohammad Khass
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 14. “A Strange Story, Indeed! An Israeli Story,” Ali ‘Ashour
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 15. “A Military Court,” Tawfiq Mo’ammar
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 16. “October 29th,” Belal [pseud.]
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 17. “And the Bullets Mowed Down the Sons of My Village,” Abu Esam [pseud.]
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 18. “I Am Not Alone,” Zaki Darwish
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 19. “Dignity,” Zaki Darwish
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 20. “Bewilderment,” Najeeb Susan
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 21. “Um Shaker,” Deeb Aabdie
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 22. “Nur’s Red Placard,” Mohammad Naffa’
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 23. “The Grandchildren,” Mohammad Naffa’
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 24. “By God, I Have Never Betrayed You Except Once,” George Gharieb
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 25. “The Mortgaged Ring,” Riyadh Husain Mahmoud
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • 26. “Such Are the Dreams of Our Children!,” Anonymous
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 27. “The Dust of the Alleys,” Salem Haddad
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • 28. “Mahmoud Does Not Retreat,” Tawfiq Zayyad
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • Note
  • Bibliography
  • Series index

| ix →

Acknowledgments

For permission to use copyright material, we would like to thank Al-Ittiād.

For permission to use cover image, we would like to thank Mr Ibrahim Hejazi.

We would like to express our thanks and gratitude for Dr. Michael Hegeman for his notes, comments, questions and suggestions. We highly appreciate Mr. Simon Jacobs’ remarks and ideas.

We are greatly indebted to Dr. Lyn Barzilai for her notes.

We would like to heartily express gratitude to our families, friends and students for their support and help.

And grateful acknowledgment is made to Hasan Khateeb: Advocate’s Office and Al Qalam Foundation for their generous financial contribution to this publication.

| 1 →

Introduction

The list of publications about Palestinian fiction is relatively long. Some publications are translations of individual works by individual writers. Sayed Kashua’s Dancing Arabs (2004), for example, tells the story of a young boy from a poor Arab village who receives a scholarship to a Jewish boarding school where he has to cope with the sense of displacement and estrangement that emerges in the wake of his attempt to compromise between two polar worlds. Similarly, Elias Khoury’s celebrated Gate of the Sun (2006) is a famous book in which the protagonist’s tale brings to life the story of an entire people driven out of their villages in their homeland. Gate of the Sun chronicles their love and ruin, survival and defeat, recollection and fantasy, thus humanizing the multifaceted Palestinian battle.

Jo Glanville’s Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women (2007) is regarded an uncommon stage of Palestinian women writers. It records the Palestinian struggle through various phases, including the First Intifada,1 the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, and the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. These varied and enthralling stories propose a compassionate, often precarious perception of the ← 1 | 2 → society, focusing on the warmth of human relations and future hopes. More important, the wide array of voices qualifies this book to enter the realm of a wider world literature than the restrictive collective identity or the traditional victim status.

Jamal Assadi’s translations of various works by individual writers are noteworthy. See for example his Mohammad Ali Taha’s “A Rose to Hafeeza’s Eyes” and Other Stories (2008), Mustafa Murrar: “The Internal Pages” and Other Stories (2010), Ibrahim Malik: The Man and his Works (2011) and Ibrahim Malik: the Culture of Peace and Co-existence (2015). Assadi has also translated and edited the works of a group of writers, like Father and Son: Selected Short Stories by Hanna Ibrahim Elias and Mohammad Ali Saeid (2009), and Three Voices from the Galilee: Selected Short Stories by Zaki Darwish, Mohammad Naffaa and Naji Daher (2009). His Loud Voices from the Holly Land: Short Fiction by Palestinian Women (2011) covers the works of ten women writers who manage to unite the contradictions of being Israeli citizens and daughters of the Palestinian people. What truly grants these Israeli-Palestinian women their unique flavor is their ability to defy rules, combat persecution, break open closed doors, and show their authentic countenances. And in Assadi’s Torn Body, One Soul: A Collection of Palestinian Short Fiction (2012) four Palestinian writers, from different regions in Palestine and abroad, tell their own tales of predicament, estrangement, marginalization, and expectations and visions in a new, magnified voice, first to their people, then to their nation, and finally to a wider English-speaking public.

Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (1994) presents the broadest assortment of modern Palestinian literature: translated poetry, short stories, and extracts from novels. Within the folds of Jayyusi’s anthology, the reader finds works written in English by Palestinian poets and personal accounts by Palestinian writers portraying the diverse facets of Palestinian life from the start of the 20th century to the present day.

Short Fiction as a Mirror of Palestinian Life in Israel, 1944–1967: Critique and Anthology seeks to document the development of the Palestinian short story as published in Al-Ittiād, an Israeli Arabic-language daily newspaper affiliated with the Israeli Communist Party and once regarded as the most essential Arab literary outlet (especially between ← 2 | 3 → 1944 and 1967). This particularly significant phase carried the seeds from which the short story grew. It was greatly influenced by the last years of the British Mandate over Palestine (1944–1948), the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the consequent changes that stalked Palestinian society in Israel up through the Arabs’ defeat in the Six Day War of 1967.

The present study is divided into two parts. Part 1 offers a general account of the development of the genre of short fiction, the different approaches that characterize it, a discussion of the language and an examination of the content. Part 2 is an anthology of twenty-five stories published by Al-Ittiād between 1944 and 1967.

The importance of collecting these stories can be traced to a number of factors. First, it is a solid fact that literature is a witness to the historical phases with which it co-exists. These stories constitute a crucial reference to circumstances that preceded by four years the Nakba (the “disaster,” “catastrophe,” or “cataclysm”) of 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes. They reflect the profound impact of the Nakba on the Palestinian people who, from 1948 to 1967, tried to express their concerns and aspirations through literature and particularly the short stories of Al-Ittiād. The assembling of these stories in one book is especially necessary since the attainment of issues of Al-Ittiād from 1948–1967 is almost impossible. There is no other primary source where a scholar can have access to these stories. In the absence of a local institute that should preserve the stories printed by Al-Ittiād, we take upon ourselves the task of publishing them in order to let the stories’ writers, who confronted unjust authority, battled repression, and recorded the suffering and struggle of everyday life, recap their stories, expectations and visions in a modern and profligate voice. Average readers will take pleasure in the fragrance of a different culture, while academics engaged in Arabic literature will have the occasion to tread new fields for academic assessment and critique.

A general examination of these stories indicates they are based on two major axioms: the place is always Palestine; the time is the British Mandate, the foundation of Israel and the period between 1948 and 1967. ← 3 | 4 →

Any examiner of the period of the British Mandate will find out that the Jews, in cooperation with European countries, particularly Britain, did their best to establish a viable state. In the process of this quest, they attempted to clamp down on the Palestinian population and force them to abandon their lands and depart to neighboring Arab-speaking countries. In response, a small number of writers took the initiative to write stories to tell the real conditions under which Palestinians found themselves. Their stories were accurate and realistic portrayals of everyday circumstances.

To give this critical period its due, we believe it was necessary not only to translate and collect the bulk of stories but also to study them.

The twenty-five short stories of Part 2 were translated and edited with assistance from Michael Hegeman and Simon Jacobs. No endeavor was made to pick out the most renowned works. Our objective was to bring together an illustrative compendium of the twenty-five works, representing the bulk of the stories published by Al-Ittiād between 1944 (the first year of its appearance) and 1967. These stories were written by a group of local writers who can be considered pioneers of the Palestinian short story in Israel. Some writers are known to have written one story only, and to have used pen names and kept their real identity permanently unknown. In either case, it might have been a mere handful of writers who wrote many stories and got the lion’s share of acclamation. This variation among writers’ creativity may be ascribed to a variety of reasons. One may be the author’s writing motive and experience, or even age. Writers who were politically and socially involved acquired more experience and motivation than young, inexperienced ones. Another reason is the author’s political orientation. Those who were linked to the Communist Party and its leaders had a better chance of writing and getting wide audiences. It must be pointed out, however, that the majority of the authors were not professionals. Rather, their writing was a sort of hobby or merely a statement about the course of life.

It should be noted that the translated stories have been maintained in their original version without modifications, corrections or revision of errors. The errors, whether in print, spelling or grammar, can be ascribed to a variety of factors. It is very likely that some writers were ← 4 | 5 → still at the beginning of their careers, and their command of language inadequate. Some errors are probably errors in printing and proofreading. And it is also conceivable that some language mistakes occurred because the language of the stories, though originally intended to be literary Arabic, was influenced by the spoken language and, in consequence, in some places emerged as an intermediate language.

Concerning the content, the stories compiled propose a genuine portrait of the numerous predicaments, concerns, apprehensions and coercions that the Arab community inside Israel suffered between 1944 and 1967. To a great extent, these difficulties are currently the portions of many ethnic groups and communities in the Middle East as well as other parts of the world. The stories often offer multifaceted and incongruous interactions between the tyrannical authorities and the weak, defenseless citizens. They deal with the real and the fictional, the normal and the irrational, war and peace, affection and abhorrence, and optimism and despair. The contradictory forces did not paralyze the writers, who managed to preserve and to fight for dignity, freedom and justice. The majority of the stories are more like a reflection of the writer’s personality, the toll of his life experiences. They are a faithful recording of the reality of events that occurred to the writer in person or to people in his surroundings. As phrased by Saleh Fakhrie, a notable critic, “story writers within the occupied territory are distinguished for employing a purely documentary language concerned with the particularity of the event and its genuine realism”2 (Saleh 1982, 43).3 Thus, most stories express the concerns of the working class and peasants, and the different types of exploitation that they were subjected to in various sectors before and after the establishment of the State of Israel. The writers indicate that a change of power did not bring a change in the overall situation of the Palestinian peasants and working class. Rather, the new political system was an extension of the old in every detail. It might be said that the common denominator of most stories is the writers’ aspiration towards education, guidance, advice and morality. It was only natural that writers were prompted to employ characters who were marked by their popularity, realism and regionalism. These characters were an embodiment of social models who were poor and simple figures from predominantly rural backgrounds. In other ← 5 | 6 → words, the focus of the stories is on the patterns of everyday life in every detail (Tuma 1993, 6; Ghanayem 1995, 37–38). The majority of the stories are humble initial attempts that fail to rise to the level of the short story in terms of a highly evolved literary concept. Some stories do not even transcend being merely a quick snapshot or a simple account of a real-life event.

Details

Pages
XII, 184
Year
2017
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433148279
ISBN (PDF)
9781453919095
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433148286
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433135361
DOI
10.3726/978-1-4539-1909-5
Language
English
Publication date
2017 (November)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2017. XII, 184 pp.

Biographical notes

Jamal Assadi (Author) Saif Abu Saleh (Author)

Jamal Assadi, senior lecturer (A), chairs the Department of English and the Department of English for Academic Purposes at Sakhnin College, where he also occupies other key offices. Dr. Assadi previously worked at various colleges in Israel and at An-Najah National University, Nablus. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, Dr. Assadi is the author, co-author, editor/co-editor, and translator of a dozen of books on American and Arabic literature, most notably: Acting, Rhetoric and Interpretation in Selected Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow (2006), A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007), The Road to Self-Revival: Sufism, Heritage, Intertextuality and Meta-Poetry in Modern Arabic Poetry (2011), The Story of a People: An Anthology of Palestinian Poets Within the Green-Line (2011) and Ibrahim Mālik: The Culture of Peace and Co-existence (2015). He is also a writer of children’s stories. Saif Abu Saleh is a lecturer of Arabic literature at Sakhnin College and the principal of Technological High School in Sakhnin. Dr. Abu Saleh received his M.A. from Haifa University and his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University. Dr. Abu Saleh is a notable scholar of the Arabic literature movement in Israel between 1948 and 2000.

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