The Children of the Ghetto: II - by Elias Khoury (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

2024 NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Award Finalist

An acclaimed Lebanese writer speaks to the complexity of the Palestinian experience in a devastating account of resilience and loss

Weaving personal and cultural memory into a tale that humanizes the complex Palestinian experience, Star of the Sea traces the contours of the unspeakable.

Adam Dannoun's story is one of beginnings. Born in a war-torn Israel, Adam dreams of becoming a writer. He is just an infant when Jewish forces uproot and massacre thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, including his own father. Adam's mother, crumbling with loss, takes her son to Haifa and remarries. Soon she feels stifled by her new husband. Adam flees this lifeless home and writes himself a second beginning. With nothing but his father's will and the image of his mother at the doorway, Adam is born again into the streets of Haifa.

Here he spins a new life alongside an auto-shop owner, Gabriel. Adam Dannoun shapeshifts into Adam Danon, an Israeli born into the Warsaw ghetto, and Gabriel's younger brother. There are limits to this charade, lines he's forbidden to cross--and when he falls in love with Gabriel's only daughter he steps, unawares, into a third life. Life after life, Adam confronts the horrors of his past.

Following My Name Is Adam, Star of the Sea is the second installment of a brilliant trilogy--an epic tale of love, survival, and ongoing devastation.

Review Quotes

"I have the feeling that when the concluding volume of Children of the Ghetto appears in English, we'll have in our hands one of the most indelible epics in 21st-century literature, a Palestinian story no reader will be able to forget."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Khoury felt that the constant turmoil of war, displacement and oppression that marked the modern Arab world required a new type of novel, one that reflected his era's discombobulated reality. Often beginning with a single sustained encounter, his novels spin outward, kaleidoscopically, into the past and across borders."
--New York Times

"Khoury has long been focused on the aftereffects of the Nakba, most notably in Gate of the Sun (2006), emphasizing the cruelty of forced expulsion and the confusions of statelessness . . . Adam recalls his intense, hopeful, and difficult relationships with women . . . [adding] lyrical and deeper elements . . . A powerful chronicle of the search for peace and identity amid constant disruption."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Khoury skillfully evokes the cruel absurdities of Israeli occupation as Adam attempts to cope with past and present anguish."
--Leslie Williams, Booklist

"Like Khoury's masterpiece Gate of the Sun (1998), Star of the Sea shows how the history and experience of the 1948 Palestinian Catastrophe (the Nakba) can be most powerfully conveyed through fiction. His brilliance, compassion and sharp humour lives on inside it."
--Karma Nabulsi, History Today

"I love the universe Khoury built from existing worlds . . . I am looking forward to the final volume of Children of the Ghetto not because there will be any additional plot points or revelations but rather because the existing installments have given me an irrational amount of pleasure, upon rereading, the long spirals of Khoury's voice telling me things it seems like I'd never heard before or simply didn't believe until they were said over and over."
--Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns

"Gives voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages."
--Edward Said

About the Author

Elias Khoury (1948-2024) was a novelist, journalist, playwright, and lifelong activist for social justice. His novel Gate of the Sun, called 'a genuine masterwork' by the New York Times, was named Best Book of the Year by Le Monde Diplomatique, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Christian Science Monitor. Also available through Archipelago: Yalo, As Though She Were Sleeping (winner of France's Arabic Novel Prize), Broken Mirrors, and White Masks.

Humphrey Davies was a translator of Arabic fiction, historical and classical texts. Born in England, he was based in Cairo from the 1990's to 2021. His translations include Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's Leg Over Leg, Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis, and Naguib Mafouz's Middaq Alley. He received the Banipal Prize twice.