A Small Press Book We Love: Children of the Ghetto by Elias Khoury
Small presses have had a rough year, but as the literary world continues to conglomerate, we at Literary Hub think they’re more important than ever. Which is why, every (work) day in March—which just so happens to be National Small Press Month—a Lit Hub staff member will be recommending a small press book that they love.
The only rule of this game is that there are no rules, except that the books we recommend must have been published, at some time, and in some place, by a small press. What does it mean to be a small press? Unfortunately there is no exact definition or cutoff. All of the presses mentioned here are considered to be small presses by the recommending editors, and for our purposes, that’s going to be good enough. All of the books mentioned here are considered to be great by the recommending editors, too. If one intrigues you, consider picking it up at your local bookstore, or ordering through Bookshop.org, or even directly from the publisher.
Today, we’re recommending:
Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, by Elias Khoury, tr. Humphrey Davies
published by Archipelago (2019)
Elias Khoury died last year in Beirut, not living long enough to see a free Palestine. The Lebanese writer wrote a number of acclaimed books, many of which are available in translation from Archipelago. Khoury’s political, writing, and academic work was always deeply concerned with the way the Nakba continues as a wound and rupture in collective and individual lives. Khoury’s book Gate of the Sun, based in part on stories he was told in Palestinian refugee camps, is probably his best known novel, but My Name is Adam is a great place to start with his work. The first in a trilogy, the book is framed as the notebooks of Palestinian writer Adam Dannoun, who was living in exile in New York. Khoury’s introduction tells us that he came into possession of the notebooks, recovered from a fire that killed Adam, and is presenting them unedited.
Part of My Name is Adam are the notes for a novel Adam was writing, which are filled with the frustrating repetition and circling that make up the work of writing but rarely make it to a final draft. These chapters are not as good as Adam wants them to be, we sense, and if you’ve read other work by Khoury, you’ll recognize he’s holding himself back too. Each of the chapters from the unfinished novel are subtitled “Point of Entry”, an echo of the process of writing a novel, or of creating an identity, or of navigating the many checkpoints in a segregated and securitized Palestine.
The other notebooks are Adam’s personal account, about the Lydda Ghetto where that community’s survivors were driven. Like Khoury’s other work, Adam gathers stories from the community, peeling back layers of stifled memory. These sections feel more urgent and self-assured, but are also narratively messier, darker, and more ambiguous. The attempt at a novel imposes itself on this section of the book — Adam’s attempt to rationalize and order something out of the sprawling, unended horrors of the Nakba feel impossible, even futile. How could it ever be possible to make sense of such a catastrophe, in art or in memory?
–James Folta, Staff Writer
