Book World: A debut at crossroads of Mideast conflict
Porter Shreve, The Washington Post
Feb. 4, 2021
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By Rebecca Sacks
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There s a moment in Rebecca Sacks kaleidoscopic debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates, where a foreign dignitary visiting a government office in Ramallah laments the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has gripped the region for more than half a century: Both sides have suffered. But you know what they say. An eye for an eye, until the whole world is blind. And when will it end? His comment follows the series of tragic events around which the book revolves: After the Israelis announced an expansion of several settlements, a Hamas terrorist slipped through the open window of a 14-year-old settlement girl named Yael and stabbed her to death. Days later, in retaliation, a mob of young Jewish men surrounded Salem, a random Arab teenager, and beat him so badly that he lies comatose, near death, in a hospital bed in East Jerusalem.
Rebecca Sacks is the author of City of a Thousand Gates.
The lasting division brought about by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the painful truths about occupation and the larger tensions of living in this contentious warring space are at the center of Rebecca Sacks’ debut novel City of a Thousand Gates. But so is a poignant humanizing of this story as the characters battle for security and dignity and a convivial space for the future of their own children.
From the outset, you realize that City of a Thousand Gates is ambitious and expansive. The book’s opening pages include a directory with the names and brief descriptors of some 28 characters whose lives intersect in the West Bank setting of the novel. There are Israeli settlers and Palestinians and a diversity of storylines and relationships to keep track of.
By Rebecca Sacks
Harper, 384 pages, $27.99
As her epigraph suggests, Rebecca Sacks’ lovely debut novel, “City of a Thousand Gates,” concerns the impact of “the high drama of history” on individual lives. The phrase is drawn from Robert Musil’s philosophical novel, “The Man Without Qualities.” Here the lives are those of assorted, mostly sympathetic Israelis and Palestinians, along with their romantic partners, friends and relatives. And the high drama is the struggle over statehood, territory, recognition, and rights that pits nationality against nationality, and neighbor against neighbor.
The panoramic ambition, scope and complexity of “City of a Thousand Gates” is embodied in its “Cast of Characters” – 32 in all, in nine distinct groupings. The third-person narration offers a mosaic of perspectives, shifting fluidly, but without much change in voice or style, from character to character.
The following is excerpted from Rebecca Sacks debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates
, about present-day Israel and Palestine. Sacks has been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and the Mellon-Sawyer Documenting War Seminar Series. She worked for several years at Vanity Fair before moving to Israel, and her dispatches from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have been published in journals such as the Paris Review Daily.
He knows the bus is pulling into the Central Station because it slows to ascend a ramp. The closer he gets, the calmer he gets. None of this is intuitive. He’s never terrified when he should be terrified. The first time Hamid came inside without papers, he was stupid about it, and so of course got tear canisters shot at him. This was before he had the job with Segev. Before he knew how it worked the early-morning rides down south to spots where you can slip through, the waiting cars before it was all a routine. He