HAYATI, MY LIFE

From a professor of Arabic literature, an elegantly written but programmatic debut novel attempts to illuminate the plight of the Palestinians in a tale of three generations of women caught in the crossfires of history.

The story, moving back and forth between the generations and over the years, begins in 1990 when Assia, living in Kuwait with her husband Basil and younger daughter Araf, calls her elder daughter Maryam, living in Israel, and says the family is trying to leave because the Iraqis are invading. Maryam, married to a pro-Palestinian Israeli, has not seen Assia since 1967, when she left to seek a cure for Araf, who can't—or won't—talk. Assia and Maryam are joined by Araf, Hibba, a niece, and Aziz, Hibba’s lover. All of them detail the painful cost of being Palestinian. Assia recalls how her father was killed, and her mother imprisoned, for resisting the British. Then, in 1946, recently married and fighting with Basil against the Jewish Haganah, she saw her infant son killed—a sight so traumatizing to Basil that he was unable to hold a job from then on. Maryam flashes back to her own marriage, the birth of Araf, the torture her husband suffered for siding with the Palestinians, and her bittersweet meeting with Hibba, who in 1990 left her employer and lover in Baghdad when she learned they were working for Saddam Hussein. And Araf, a talented artist, finally finds her voice—and, briefly, love—only to lose it when Assia makes a fatally wrong assumption.

The Palestinians deserve a larger fictional presence, but this agenda-driven tale, unfolded by paper-thin narrators and ranging over a period of more than six decades, is too eager to detail the horrors the principals suffer to do justice to a complex issue.