Susan Albulhawa :Scar of David (later:Mornings in Jenin)

The latest addition to my website is Susan Albulhawa ‘s Scar of David (later:Mornings in Jenin). In this novel we follow an extended Palestinian family from the British mandate in the 1940s up to the early 2000s. Our main character is Amal, whom we first meet with an Israeli pressing a gun against her temple. She is born after the Nakba and just a child in 1967 when her village, Ein Hod, is invaded by the Israelis and she and her friend have to hide, before the entire family – at least those that survive – have to flee to the camp in Jenin. She will lose further family members before going to boarding school and then getting a scholarship to Philadelphia. She risks becoming American but her Palestinian past and events in Palestine keep reappearing and she returns, even finding a husband. However the horrors the Palestinians face are never far away and she and her family suffer as much as many others. Albulhawa tells a first-class story of how an extended Palestinian family and Palestinians as a whole have suffered for the past seventy-five years.

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