Hala Alyan

From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home

Salt Houses

Bekki

She was barely three when the Israeli army rolled through Jaffa’s streets, the tanks smashing the marketplace, the soldiers dragging half-sleeping men from their homes. 

There would be the birth of a new nation, they declared. 

Salma and Hussam’s villa sat atop a small hill that overlooked the sea, with orange groves banded beneath it in strips. 

Within days the groves were mangled, soil impaled with wooden stakes, oranges scattered, pulp leaking from battered flesh. 

Alia had cried not at the sound of gunfire but at the smell of the mashed oranges, demanding slices of the fruit

They stood on the veranda while the children slept, watching the fire streak across their land, listening to the muffled shouts. 

The smell of burned oranges rose to them, scorched and sweet.

Still, her heart stirred when Alia, even at six, seven years old, spoke with the reverence of a mythologist about the enormous Jaffa pomegranates, the seeds that could be spooned out and sprinkled with either salt or sugar, depending on their ripeness. 

“They were as big as the moon,” little Alia would say, holding her starfish hands out, her voice confident. 

It would become the girl’s most endearing and exasperating quality, how she could become enamored of things already gone.

Some mornings he wakes early, full of energy and purpose, sets out to the marketplace before work and returns with bags of tomatoes, cheese wedges, pita bread still steaming. 

Other times he scrounges, making meals of almonds and a handful of figs, a desultory bite of fruit.

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