Dancing Arabs. Este artículo no está disponible.Dancing Arabs

Kashua's nameless anti-hero has grown up under the shadow of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948 and a father jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will become the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride. In scenes of heartbreaking hilarity, he changes his accent, his clothes, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between two cultures, two languages, and, eventually, a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. In a land where personal and national identities are synonymous, Dancing Arabs maps one man's struggle to disentangle the two, only to forfeit both.

Sayed Kashua was born in 1975 in Tira, and went on to study in a boarding school in Jerusalem and at Hebrew University. He lives in an Arab village near Jerusalem with his wife and daughter and works as a journalist. Until recently he had a column in Kol Ha'ir, Jerusalem's most important cultural magazine. An Arab who writes in Hebrew, he has a complicated relationship to his family and history and this project has not endeared him to his village or his people. Like the narrator/anti-hero he has alienated most people in his life, is largely barred from Israel's dominant society, and yet he remains bound to this volatile land.

Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger