On December 20 Mondoweiss published Hatim Kanaaneh’s review of my book
The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad. While I welcome any criticism that sheds a different light on a text I wrote, this review baldly misrepresented the book’s contents and mischaracterized my own approach. Kanaaneh makes a sweeping argument that I fall short in ridding myself “of the ‘Jewish Israeli’ tribal prejudices and inimical presumptions about all things Palestinian.” Needless to say, for a scholar who has dedicated his academic career to studying various aspects of Palestinian history, society, culture, and politics, this is an offensive allegation that should not go unchallenged.
Tawfīq Zayyād accompanied by Amal and Rābʿa Murqus, the daughters of Nimer Murqus in Rāas an-Nāqūra. Photo from the Digital Archive of the Palestinian Museum.
Unlike the author of this academic biography who never met the Palestinian leader Tawfiq Zayyad and only knew of him through the mainly Zionist Hebrew press, I knew Tawfiq Zayyad and respected him since the Nakba. At that life-changing juncture, he was nearly twice my age of eleven years, someone with literary promise, revolutionary bend of mind, daring, Palestinian nationalism, communist convictions and a booming voice to back it all up in his speeches. Yet this rising star was approachable even to me and my agemates. His harsh-edged voice was difficult to ignore especially with the-then-recent addition of loudspeakers.
THE WANDERING PALESTINIAN
242 pp. bhc Press. $25.95 hardcover, $15.95 paperback, $7.95 ebook.
Anan Ameri’s recently released memoir “The Wandering Palestinian” is beautifully written in the tradition of Arab story telling. Its humorous and poignant vignettes travel the reader to Beirut, Detroit, Washington DC, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jerusalem. It successfully interweaves the forty-year personal narrative of a free spirited Arab woman who arrives in the USA in 1974, with the larger issues of migration, racism, sexism, and institution building.
Readers will gain an intimate insight into Palestinian and the Arab-American communities’ efforts and aspirations to find their rightful place in the American mosaic. And Ameri includes personal stories of love and a failed marriage (to the author of this review, many years ago), struggle with depression and therapy, as well as activism and grassroots organizing that led to the creation of the Palestine Aid Society of America i