In Search of Fatima (e-book) (used book) | Ghada Karmi | bookbook.eu

Description

"The war that ended with the establishment of the State of Israel compelled Ghada Karmi's family to leave Jerusalem when she was a child - to live, ironically enough, in Golders Green, a well-known Jewish area of London. Her attempts at assimilation into English society were gradually thwarted by both internal and external influences: her mother's efforts at replicating Palestinian social customs in a London household, which she found increasingly frustrating, and political events in the world she had left - the Suez crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in particular - which prompted a growing sense of Arab identity and a reexamination of her sense of belonging in Britain. In the 1970s, this disillusionment was channelled into political activism; she established Palestine Action in London and became a regular visitor to the Middle East, meeting Yasser Arafat and PLO officials, but still, as a Westernised Arab woman, she never quite fitted in. Returning to Jerusalem in the 1990s to find the house where she was born, the author must face an unpalatable truth about herself." In Search of Fatima is an intimate and powerful narrative, in which the Israel-Palestine conflict is presented, unusually, from the point of view of a Palestinian woman. A reflection of the author's personal experiences of displacement, loss and nostalgia, it speaks also for the millions of people all over the world whose lives are forever suspended between the old and the new.