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PARTISAN REVIEW
fractures the Jewish image of Israel as a place where, at last, everyone is
the same - Jewish - and everyone else is the "enemy." The book moves
back and forth between voices, locations and times. Its most lyrical passages
introduce us to the richly tapestried life of the Arab villages, to the extended
family structures and the cruel twists of fate that impose a grotesque form on
the lives of the characters.
The persona, Anton Shammas, discovers that the cousin for whom he
was named, long thought to have died as a child, was actually "illegally"
adopted by a wealthy Beiruti couple and grew up to be an American physi–
cian. He comes across a photograph of this alter ego examining the conse–
quences of the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. At
the personal encounter between the two, which concludes the novel, "Anton
Shammas," the American physician, hands "Anton Shammas," the central
character of "The Tale" and "The Teller" sections of the novel, his own au–
tobiographical retelling of the story. We are meant to be left wondering who,
precisely, is a character in whose story. This is a bit of fun on Shammas' part.
Undoubtedly, many Palestinians have emigrated to the United States or fled
to Paris (where the Israeli "Shammas" meets some cousins). But these
are completely natural encounters for Israeli Jews forever fretting
about the Jewish Diaspora - which refused to cooperate with Zionist
ideology and emigrate or assimilate. For Israeli Jews, the Hebrews to
whom the novel is addressed, Arabs are not supposed to have cousins
who ended up as American physicians. Thus, the multiple identities of
"Anton Shammas" speak to the experience of its intended readers.
Shammas's characters are children groping toward the discovery of
their sexuality, revolutionaries, bandits, priests, and villagers whose fate
hangs by a thread above every page. Almost by chance, this one becomes a
refugee, that one remains rooted in the village. There is another voice in the
book, "Anton Shammas" the urbane (and urbanized) intellectual who has
be–
come estranged from the village. His tragedy is that
if
he cannot return to
the village, there is nowhere else he can really go. Israel lacks a neutral so–
cial setting where Arabs and Jews can interact beyond roles imposed on
them by history. For Shammas, identity is both infinitely rich and infinitely
malleable. He meets an Israeli Jewish novelist (of the Yehoshua-Oz genera–
tion, older than himself) who seeks an "educated Arab" for his novel-in–
progress. This novelist ultimately abandons Shammas for a Palestinian writer
who, in his unbridled nationalism and uncomplicated identity is closer to the
Israeli Jew than Shammas is to either of them. Introduced at a reception for
writers as an Israeli, his host recounts how, as a child, he served as a
"shabbos goy" for a Jewish family - naturally assuming that Shammas is
Jewish.
Shammas has fun with the idea of writing in Hebrew: attending an in–
ternational writer's seminar at the University of Iowa, his Hebrew type-
