**A 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist** **A 2018 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Debut Fiction**
In this “nuanced, sharp, and beautifully written” (Michael Chabon) debut novel, a young man prepares to serve in the Israeli army while also trying to reconcile his close relationship to two Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalties to family and country.
The story begins in an Israeli military jail, where—four days after his nineteenth birthday—Jonathan stares up at the fluorescent lights of his cell and recalls the series of events that led him there.
Two years earlier: Moving back to Israel after several years in Pennsylvania, Jonathan is ready to fight to preserve and defend the Jewish state. But he is also conflicted about the possibility of having to monitor the occupied Palestinian territories, a concern that grows deeper and more urgent when he meets Nimreen and Laith—the twin daughter and son of his mother’s friend.
From that morning on, the three become inseparable: wandering the streets on weekends, piling onto buses toward new discoveries, laughing uncontrollably. They share joints on the beach, trading snippets of poems, intimate secrets, family histories, resentments, and dreams. But with his draft date rapidly approaching, Jonathan wrestles with the question of what it means to be proud of your heritage, while also feeling love for those outside of your own family. And then that fateful day arrives, the one that lands Jonathan in prison and changes his relationship with the twins forever.
“Unflinching in its honesty, unyielding in its moral complexity” (Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), Sadness Is a White Bird explores one man’s attempts to find a place for himself, discovering in the process a beautiful, against-the-odds love that flickers like a candle in the darkness of a never-ending conflict.
A solid satisfying, richly empathetic, deeply unsettling but gorgeous nonetheless 3.5 stars.
We all have some vague distant knowledge about the 'middle east' problem but in this book, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes to life in with its devastating tale of friendship and tragedy.
We have our protagonist and narrator, Jonathan, who has returned to Israel from America in his late teens. He looks forward to joining the Israel Defense Force, in part to honor his freedom, fighter grandfather. His life undergoes a radical change after he meets and becomes intimate with Laith and Nimreen, dynamic Arab-Israeli brother-and-sister twins with whom he shares his deepest thoughts.
The three are inseparable. The three inevitably argue passionately about politics and identity; their raw and testy exchanges about painful realities and misperceptions of the “other” constitute some of the novel’s most gripping moments
Their closeness offers a hint of hope for the remaking of Jewish-Arab relations.
But can you love and admire people so deeply that the barriers between you are conquered? Will the real world even allow it?
Rothman-Zecher is hardly the first writer to recognize that “otherness” is the most seductive spice in all the Middle East, nor is he the first to explore a “Romeo and Juliet” narrative between Jews and Arabs. But Sadness Is A White Bird may be the most artful and irresistible exploration of “illicit” love in the Holy Land.
It has its flaws like it sort of failed to maintain the emotional intensity in the end but it offers all that one could wish for in a coming of age tale explored through the intimate bonds between young Jewish and Muslim Israelis.
