Susan Abulhawa

Palestine, 1948. A mother clutches her six-month-old son as Israeli soldiers march through the village of Ein Hod. In a split second, her son is snatched from her arms and the fate of the Abulheja family is changed forever. Forced into a refugee camp in Jenin and exiled from the ancient village that is their lifeblood, the family struggles to rebuild their world. Their stories unfold through the eyes of the youngest sibling, Amal, the daughter born in the camp who will eventually find herself alone in the United States; the eldest son who loses everything in the struggle for freedom; the stolen son who grows up as an Israeli, becoming an enemy soldier to his own brother. Mornings in Jenin is a devastating novel of love and loss, war and oppression, and heartbreak and hope, spanning five countries and four generations of one of the most intractable conflicts of our lifetime.

Mornings in Jenin

Marion

In the sorrow of a history buried alive, the year 1948 in Palestine fell from the calendar into exile, ceasing to reckon the marching count of days, months, and years, instead becoming an infinite mist of one moment in history. The twelve months of that year rearranged themselves and swirled aimlessly in the heart of Palestine. The old folks of Ein Hod would die refugees in the camp, bequeathing to their heirs the large iron keys to their ancestral homes, the crumbling land registers issued by the Ottomans, the deeds from the British mandate, their memories and love of the land, and the dauntless will not to leave the spirit of forty generations trapped beneath the subversion of thieves.

We were refugees, all of us. Those who had fled had become refugees once again, in another human junkyard dotting Israels brief history. And those of us who had remained became prisoners in Jenin.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin.

Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel.

Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

"Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed.

But the heart must grieve. Sometimes pain emerged as joy. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. For the generations born in the camps, grief found repose in a bed of necrophilia.

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“If they had a sense of the land then the land would compel in them a love for the olives,” Yehya said, staring at the palms that had caressed those majestic, beloved trees only hours earlier. Age-dappled and rough, his farmer’s hands were infused with the melanin truths of those hills. The truth that an olive branch flowers only once and if it isn’t pruned back will produce buds that become new slender springs by winter. The truth that an olive’s worst biological enemy is a small lacy-winged fly and that sheep are good to keep around because they supply the soil with needed nitrogen. Yehya’s hands knew those facts from a lifetime devoted to trees and their earth. 

How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruit of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? 

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