Exactly two years ago, when Said Kashua was 26, his first book, "Dancing Arabs" (Modan Press), a collection of short stories, became a best-seller. It was on Israeli best-seller lists for nearly three months and international success followed soon after. The book was translated into Italian, German, French and Dutch and an English translation is due to appear in the United States in a few months. Kashua, who had previously written in his popular newspaper columns in the Kol Ha'ir and Ha'ir weeklies about his life as a young married man, and then as father of a Palestinian-Israeli family living in Jerusalem - always with barely a cent to his name - started to earn some very impressive sums.
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The book's success led to a flood of trips abroad. Kashua became such a frequent flyer that his daughter Nai, now 3, started calling him "Felix the Flying Rabbit."
"I hate flying," he says. "The first time I flew with my wife, Najat, was the first time I'd ever flown in my life, and that was just a short flight to Turkey. I spent the whole time with my shirt pulled over my head. Then I got used to it."
This week, Kashua's second book, "Vayehi Boker" ("And It was Morning") is being published. All the money he made from the translations of his first book (after 50 percent went to Modan and another 12 percent to his agent and taxes), he spent long ago, and he says that "like an idiot" he also went and wasted the very fat advance he received from Keter for his new book, on the purchase of a new Volkswagon Golf, "and now I again have barely a cent to my name." Still, he has gained something from his literary success: The security inspectors at the airport have started to recognize him.
"When I come to the airport, they always send me with all the other Israeli Arabs to the foreign workers' line," he says. "I don't mind. I feel like I belong more with all the people from abroad and the foreign workers than in the Israelis' line. Like with all the Arabs, they use the `suspect procedure' on me. I arrive four hours before the flight. They do a body search in a back room behind the curtain and then escort me onto the plane because they're afraid that on the way I might pick up a bomb from someone. The most exhausting interrogation I ever went through was on the way back from Milan. Three interrogators questioned me there for an hour and a half, one after the other, and in the end, the last one asked me for the book."
Next year, Kashua hopes to be living somewhere else. If all goes well, he and his family will be moving to Berlin, financed by the prestigious German publishing house Berlin Verlag. "For as long as I've known her, my wife has wanted to get away from here," he says. "And in recent years, I've also come to see it as the only solution."
Rising stock
Newspaper readers, particularly readers of Jerusalem's Kol Ha'ir and Tel Aviv's Ha'ir, know more than a little about Kashua's life. He was born in the village of Tira, the second of four sons. His father worked as a bank teller and his mother was a teacher. When he was 15, he was accepted to the Israel Arts and Sciences Academy High School in Jerusalem, a boarding school that is very highly regarded in the country. "Yes, I passed some tough admissions exams," he says, "but I've always harbored the suspicion that I was nonetheless accepted because of statistics, as the token Arab." Several stories in "Dancing Arabs" describe his experiences trying to fit in as an Arab in a Jewish dormitory.
"I remember the first time I left to go home," he relates. "I got on the No. 23 bus from the dorm to go to the Egged central bus station, but there were kids from the school next to ours on the bus and as soon as they noticed that I was an Arab, they started singing to me on the bus, `Death to Arabs.' I got off the bus and caught a cab to the bus station and took another bus from there. But when the bus arrived at the stop by the airport, I was the only one who was made to get off for a security inspection. It was a terrible insult. The second terrible insult that day. When I got home, I told my parents that I was never going back to Jerusalem, but I went back."
After high school, he studied philosophy and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There, in the student dorms, he met his wife Najat, who is also from Tira. She was studying social work and is currently working on her master's degree. After graduation, he got a job as a reporter with Kol Ha'ir. He wrote feature articles and later became a television critic and got his own column. His winning style, his insistence on not becoming a "pet Arab" who toes the synthetic Israeli line, as well as certain statements on his part - such as how when he hears the Israeli national anthem "Hatikva" being played, he goes to the bathroom - drew some critical slings and arrows, directed at him and his editors and couched in patriotic, nationalistic tones.
And precisely because of this, his stock in the journalistic world rose. Suddenly, the idea of putting an Arab in a job that wasn't necessarily restricted to reporting on Arab affairs, the territories or Islam seemed like a brilliant stroke. His column, in which he wrote about his wife's pregnancy and their anticipation of their daughter's birth, established his writing talent.
The Al-Aqsa Intifada and heightened public attention to the status of Arabs in Israel made the need for an Israeli-Arab journalist who could report from the field that much more pressing. Kashua, who began to make frequent television appearances, received offers from national newspapers. He was most pleased by the offer to become a regular columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth's weekend magazine, "7 Days." He saw it as "the biggest journalistic break I could think of." The contract with Yedioth seemed totally complete, down to the fine print; he resigned from Kol Ha'ir and more or less on the day he was supposed to begin his new job, the contract was canceled, apparently as a result of power struggles in the paper's editorial board.
"To this day, I don't know if what happened was the result of the war between `7 Days' and the newspaper's editor, or because of my views," he says, "but it was terrible for me and that's when all my bitterness toward the world of journalism and this profession started. I suddenly found myself without Kol Ha'ir, where I'd loved working, and without Yedioth as well. `Dancing Arabs' hadn't come out yet, and I was left with nothing."
Luckily for him, he was offered a job at Ha'ir, and then "Dancing Arabs" came out and became a big success. Various publishers offered to give him an advance to write another book. He chose Keter, both because of the amount of money it offered and because "I greatly admire Shimon Adaf," editor of its Hebrew literature series.
Kashua's life seemed to be well on track, until early 2003, when he got a phone call from Ha'air informing him that his job was being eliminated due to budget cuts. Though he was offered the possibility of freelance work, he still felt adrift without a reliable source of income. At this point, he agreed to go along with his wife's advice and move back to Tira, where a house (needing renovations) awaited them, since they could barely pay rent on an apartment in Jerusalem.
Back to Tira
In March 2003, the Kashua family moved to Tira. And this is the point - when a young family with a small daughter moves back from the city to the parents' home village - at which his new book also opens. The transition back to village life is depicted as a kind of tragedy, as the end of all their hopes and dreams. The narrator's wife is the one who foresees this tragedy from the beginning and warns her husband, "You don't know what they're like there." The narrator discovers the truth of this as soon as he arrives in the village, just as Kashua, after returning to Tira, began painting his village in his column in Ha'ir in very depressing tones.
The overlap between Kashua's life as he described it in his column and the plot of his book gives the impression that this is essentially an autobiography; an impression that is bolstered by the very direct and personal kind of language that Kashua uses both in the column and the book, which is full of humor and sarcasm, and by the fact that the fictitious narrator, like Kashua himself, is a journalist at a Tel Aviv newspaper. This is also the book's strength. But it's not exactly an autobiography.
Kashua's father, Darwish, was "totally fine, actually. He was active in Matzpen [a radical left movement] and spent three years in administrative detention." In the book, however, the narrator's father is an ardent Zionist. "Also, my mother, Halima, worked as a teacher her whole life," says Kashua. "She wasn't one of these women who never leave the kitchen, like the mother in the book."
About his wife, Najat, Kashua says, "After five years of marriage, she is still the most beautiful and attractive woman in the world." In the book, however, the narrator's wife is a heavy, unattractive woman and a not very clever teacher, who imparts to her village pupils chapters in the history of Zionism, without having a clue that the "pioneers" were Jewish, not Arab, immigrants.
In the book, Kashua describes relations between Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the first person. In his narrative, Arab society exploits the Palestinians and condescends to them. There is the violence and crime in the Arab village, the social insularity, the primitiveness, the life inside a closed ghetto - with everything seen from the point of view of someone who has seen a totally different world in his life in the city and amid a Jewish work environment. The narrator's reportorial tone and his convincing depictions of daily life in the village make the story's plot seem concretely possible. The political events that have occurred since Kashua began writing the book make it that much more real.
Turning point
At Kashua's request, and so as not to detract at all from the tension that is so gracefully built into the book, the final, most important turning point in the story will not be revealed here. But there is an earlier turning point that occurs one morning when the villagers wake up to discover that a curfew has been imposed on their village, and that tanks and armed troops who fire at anyone who tries to leave the village have appeared around fences that have also suddenly materialized to enclose the village. In the course of the story, villagers try to satisfy the soldiers by sacrificing the Palestinian workers who live in the village. The soldiers kill the Palestinians and the villagers stand by and do nothing. They also load the Palestinians onto trucks. Water, food and cigarettes all run out in the village. Violence increases. People fight over the last can of baby formula. These passages carry echoes of the descriptions of the Holocaust.
"Primo Levi is one of the writers I most admire. He influenced me very much," says Kashua - but it's hard to tell how serious he is.
Have you always been interested in the Holocaust?
"The Holocaust, racism and hatred of `the other' are my subjects. When I was abroad, I got very moving responses because of this. Jews in Italy thought the book was about them. They told me that I'd done a great job of describing the life of a minority. Russian immigrants in Israel told me they identified with the book for the same reason, because that's how they lived in Russia. I also got some very moving responses from East Berlin. Because a minority is a minority is a minority. A minority always suffers from racism and hatred of `the other,' and in the end, becomes like that itself. But you should know that while I was writing the book, I was under great pressure to get it published before what I described in it became reality. I barely made it. You can see just from the most recent events that a new hierarchy of killing has been created. First it was only permissible to kill Palestinians. Then came the Wadi Ara incidents [in which 13 Israeli Arab citizens were killed by police fire] that proved that it's also permissible to kill Israeli Arabs, and now it's also permissible to kill leftists. Apparently, the settlers are the safest."
Ever `the other'
Kashua appears doomed to be defined as "the other" no matter where he goes. He writes only in Hebrew, the result of his years in the high school dormitory and the university. "To write in Arabic the way I speak it, in a Palestinian-Israeli dialect, just isn't possible," he says. "Only literary Arabic is used for writing and I don't know it well enough. The Arab books that I read are in Hebrew translation."
The village is too smothering for him. In the city, he can at least enjoy a blessed anonymity. Most of his friends are Jews. His critical observations of Arab village society, which were expressed in his previous book as well, aroused a wave of angry reactions - "though, as much criticism as I have of the Arab leaders of Arab countries and of the lack of democracy and of the wrongs that these leaders are doing to their nations, I still feel there is no greater injustice than that which Israel is doing to the Palestinians."
Kashua says the negative reactions he received from Arabs regarding "Dancing Arabs" really bothered him. "In one newspaper, they wrote that I used Zionist terminology. I didn't understand where that came from. How could it be that all the reviews in Hebrew and the reviews abroad said that I illuminated the suffering of the Arabs, and suddenly, to the Arabs, I'm the enemy?" he asks.
"But that's how it is with a society that isn't accustomed to looking at itself. I believe that writers and artists have a clear purpose - to illuminate points of darkness and to fight the establishment - but they don't get it. When I was writing the book, the whole thing with Baghdad started. All kinds of people were stealing tiles from hospitals. There were terrible acts of looting. As an Arab, I felt humiliated that Arabs were behaving this way.
"I wrote in my column that because of such behavior, it was the most humiliating thing now to be an Arab, and I added humorously that therefore my wife and I had suddenly discovered that we actually belong to a Jewish tribe and out of joy, my wife hung pictures of Herzl over the bed. And then a rumor spread in Tira that I had really converted. Either people aren't accustomed to cynicism and take everything literally, or they just can't stand the fact that I also criticize Arab society. Maybe it's because Arab society is still built of clans, which may also explain why it doesn't have democracy yet. But it's very important to emphasize: Just because I criticize Arab society, it doesn't mean that I'm pro-Israeli. On the contrary. Nothing compares to Israel's injustices toward the Arab world."
Village as ghetto
Said, Najat and Nai lived in Tira for exactly five months. In August 2003, "I gave the first draft to Shimon Adaf and that same week, we returned to Jerusalem, thank God." They live in Beit Safafa, in a rented house. "It's a shitty place, there's no hummus," Kashua jokes. "But the truth is that I'm very comfortable here where no one knows me."
Was it really so terrible in Tira?
"Much worse. Not that I hate Tira. I love Tira. People live there whom I love very much - my parents and my brothers and Najat's wonderful family. But the problem with Tira is that it's an Arab village and the problem with an Arab village is that you can't escape from it. It's a ghetto that only a few are able to leave. What happens there, like in a ghetto, is that there is no law enforcement. Power is the governing factor, the crime is terrible. Of course, there is no infrastructure and it's one big tribe that keeps growing and the crowding is intolerable.
"Life for the Arabs in Israel is progressing toward a known end. The basic thing in modern society is the transition from the village to the city or from one place to another, but that doesn't happen in Israeli Arab society because the Arabs have no place to go. All the neighborhoods and communities that are built for young couples are not meant for Arabs. So what's happening is that we've become a slave society: People go to work for Jews in their cities and communities and then come back to sleep in the ghetto. There's this racism where people say: `Oh, I've been to Tira. You should see the beautiful villas they have there and yet they complain.' That's because in all of Tira there are maybe 50 nice houses, but no one notices that there are no access roads to these houses. No one notices the sewage flowing in the streets; they don't take that into consideration either.
"In general, everything that goes on in Arab society doesn't make it into the press here. In Tamra, a war has been going on for a month now. There's a gang war with weapons and people are being killed. Has anyone mentioned it in the press? Whenever I go to Tira, I hear about someone else who was murdered for criminal reasons, but I never read about it in the newspapers because there is no rule of law in the Arab villages. Crime is everywhere, but nowhere is it at the levels you find in the Arab communities. Two out of the five major crime families in Israel are Arabs. But who's interested? The Arabs can just kill each other, for all anyone cares."
Do you really believe it's possible that Israeli Arab villages and communities would be put under curfew?
"What a question. Not only the extreme right, but even people like Ephraim Sneh [of the Labor Party] have already suggested that the Triangle and the Negev be added to Palestine. I think that the Israeli mainstream feels that Israeli Arabs are a bone in the throat. It's obvious that we weren't part of the Zionist program. I think that this is already the third year that the Zionist Congress and now the Herzliya Conference, too, have talked about `Israeli Arabs and the Demographic Problem.'
"Of course, the most urgent and important issue on the Jewish mind is to what to do about this gang of rabbits that keeps spawning children in order to be a demographic threat. And then, after the Wadi Ara riots, you started hearing people say that if we identify that much with the Palestinians, why don't we just move to Palestine? I have a very big problem with the Arabs in Israel. Our problem is that we don't dictate anything. We only react to plans that others make about us. I'd like us to at least prepare for these plans before they happen. That's another reason that I wrote the book."
What's so terrible about the idea of transferring the Triangle and the Negev to Palestine?
"What's terrible about it is that we're not given any chance to think about what we want. No one asks us. Someone else decides for us. As if there's always this question: You define yourselves as Palestinians, why don't you move to Palestine? Now, the answer is quite clear. We're not talking about a high-tech superpower or a glorious democracy that is going to arise. It's clear that the economic situation and the absence of democracy are what matter. We've grown accustomed to living in a democracy, but the democracy apparently hasn't grown accustomed to us."
The book contains some very harsh descriptions of relations between Israeli-Arab society and Palestinian society. Is that really how it is?
"Definitely. We learned all about aliyah [immigration] absorption from the Jews. Just as each group of immigrants here abuses the groups that come after it, this is what we're doing to the Palestinians. The lesson was learned. The Israeli Arabs condescend to the Palestinians. The word `dafawi' [meaning `an Arab from the territories] is a curse word. I remember how once, at the swimming pool in Tira, they didn't want to let Palestinians in, just like a pool in Jerusalem didn't want to let Ethiopians in. The Israeli Arabs have learned how to exploit the Palestinians. In Tira, there were stories about how the Palestinian workers hide their money in the sand because they keep getting robbed. Twice there were lynchings.
"My father told me that once in the 1970s, [Palestinians] were accused of starting up with girls, just like the excuse they used to use for lynching blacks in towns in the American South, and once they accused them of stealing. We're not a very enlightened society. There's exploitation all the time when it comes to transporting laborers. The Israeli Arabs charge something like NIS 200 for a ride from the Taibeh checkpoint to Tira, a trip that should cost maybe NIS 50, and the Palestinians pay because they have no choice and no one else will give them a ride. The whole contracting industry is built on exploitation. We've become their bosses, abusers and exploiters."
Your father read the book. How did he react?
"He said: `You've provided the Jews with a very nice plan. Now they don't have to bother. They can just take your plan as it is and do it.'"
What was the final straw that made you leave Tira?
"Aside from everything else, it was because of our little girl. She really disliked Tira. Even though the most expensive preschool there costs just NIS 250 a month, we couldn't send her there. It's awful how the preschool looks. We started to search for a preschool for her. A typical experience was what happened when I called a preschool in Tel Mond. On the phone, the woman there told me that they had room. We all showered and dressed nicely, we polished the car and splashed ourselves with all the nice-smelling perfumes we had at home and then we went there.
"As soon as the woman there figured out where we were from, she immediately remembered that actually, they had no room for the coming year or the one after that. Then we tried looking in Ramat Hakovesh and in Tzur Yigal. They didn't accept us. We thought of moving to Jaffa, but it's expensive there and Najat is studying in Jerusalem anyway. So we came here and now the girl goes to the bilingual preschool, where they teach in both Hebrew and Arabic. She is very happy and I hope that she still doesn't know the difference between a Jew and an Arab."
And if she asks, what will you tell her?
"If we stay with her in Israel, she'll figure it out herself."
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
