EVERY MOMENT IS A LIFE

A compilation of short essays from young Palestinian writers chronicling the toll of Israel’s assault on their homeland since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

This slim volume grew out of Palestinian American writer and activist abulhawa’s writing workshop with Palestine’s Culture and Free Thought Association, in sessions that participants attended despite the difficulty and risk of gathering. While all of the contributors have seen friends, neighbors, and family members killed by Israeli violence, these pieces sharpen on the smaller, but no less devastating, daily consequences of the campaign of displacement. A thread of shared physical experiences winds through many of the essays—the filth of makeshift bathrooms, the flaps of refugee tents, and the din of drones and explosions—making the shared chords of anxiety, fear, and grief tactile. But the contributors also bring the individuality of their conditions, the jobs they are struggling to perform (or have had to abandon), their roles as parent, child, or spouse, or the particular shape of their longings for home. An aid worker races through the streets seeking diapers; a wife is forced to leave her husband without anyone to translate soldiers’ directions into sign language; a fashionista visits the rubble of her home to salvage her most treasured belongings. Despite the cacophony of missiles and the repeated wrenching of checkpoint separations, each explosion is distinct, as are its victims, anticipation, and aftermath. Achingly rich with sensory details of a land being made increasingly and traumatically barren, this is not a project to make sense of brutality but to compel witness to it.

An electrifying, if harrowing, anthology of Palestinian voices that will define a generation.