Product Description

Very few diaspora Palestinians have written memoirs as intimate as Ghada Karmi's frank account of her life: her childhood in Palestine, the flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948, and coming of age in the coffee-bars of Golders Green, the middle-class Jewish quarter in North London. A gentle humour describes the bizarre and sometimes tense realities that mask her life in 'Little Tel Aviv' and, later, her struggle, like that of many other women in the late fifties, to get a university grant to study medicine.

The intimacy of the book is set against the continuing crisis in the Middle East. In her case it is not an account of physical hardships and abuse. Her immediate family was lucky. But as she grew older, memories of the lost homeland began to haunt her. Her anger grows at the self-deception of most Israelis, who justify the appalling actions of their governments by pretending that what is taking place isn't actually happening.

In Search of Fatima reminds us that the only crime the Palestinians committed was to be born in Palestine. Its author, a committed physician, is desperate for the wounds to heal, but grim-visaged History refuses to oblige.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1149639 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Karmi, a doctor and founding member of the British political group Palestine Action, relates her quest for cultural identity after her "fragile... and misfit Arab family" leaves Jerusalem for England during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Ironically, they resettle in a Jewish neighborhood in London; Karmi, aged nine, quickly begins to assimilate-becoming an avid reader of English literature and befriending Jewish neighbors-despite her mother's insistence on traditional Palestinian culinary customs, dating mores and family codes. Over the next two decades, events in the Middle East make their non-Arab neighbors increasingly hostile and her Jewish friends' pro-Israel fervor grows; after the Palestinian terrorist hijackings of the 1970s, some acquaintances refuse to speak to her. Karmi becomes an impassioned pro-Palestinian activist, and in 1977 she begins practicing medicine in a Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon-and finds that her Western upbringing and habits make her even less welcome there than she was in England. Karmi writes engagingly, weaving Palestinian political and social history through her personal recollections and giving the age-old emigr‚ dilemmas a timely twist. Though her account is inevitably one-sided regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the book's straightforward tone may appeal to politically minded readers looking for insight into the Palestinian exile experience. 20 b&w photos, 3 maps.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
A conscious and skillful attempt to educate the West into emotional sympathy with a Palestine. -- Barnaby Rogerson, Lebanon Daily Star, 17 April 2004

A very moving memoir...Karmi tells an intimate family story...as it's ever been done. -- Creative Loafing, 4 December 2002

Her memoir is the story of a fascinating woman...humanly rich and interesting. -- Edward Said

About the Author
Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem and trained as a doctor of medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British-Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Her previous books include The Ethnic Health Factfile and Jerusalem Today.

Customer Reviews

What happened to Palestine and the Palestinians
This is an excellent and thoughtful book that takes the reader through the events that led to the destruction of Palestine and forced hundreds of thousands of people, like Fatima and her family from their homes. For many Palestinians, reading this book relives memories of a tragedy that so many of us have suffered and so little of the American public knows. I highly recommend it as an introduction to Palestine and the origin of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel.

The second half of the book which deals with the protagonist's search for identity in England is also very characteristic of what the Palestinian families who were forced to emigrate to different countries all over the world have to face: complete assimilation versus living in the injury done to us by the creation of the Israeli state.

There is no need for "the other viewpoint" in this book. This is the personal story of a Palestinian in the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Ms. Karmi does not need to justify the Israeli's feelings, although I think she actually tried.

An Arab-English Hybrid
Ghada Karmi's book tells the dramatic story of her search for personal and political identity. Her family was forced out of their comfortable West Jerusalem home by Jewish attacks meant to rid the area of Palestinians beginning in January 1948. Finally the infamous Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948 made them realize months and weeks after most of their neighbors that their personal safety was at risk. Since the author was a girl of 9 at the time she was young enough to be strongly influenced by English culture when their family finally landed in London about a year later.

Much of Ms. Karmi's book is devoted to the story of her bumpy and courageous journey to discover whether she is English, Arab or "some kind of hybrid." As devoutly as she wished to become English, events intrude on her in both personal and political ways. She loses out in a school speaking contest not on the merits but because the judges refuse to reward a prize to the "little dark girl," instead of to an English girl. The 1956 Suez War highlights for the teenage Karmi English discrimination and hatred toward Arabs and makes her an outcast at school. Another key turning point was the smashing Israeli victory in the 1967 war which plays a role in breaking up her marriage to an Englishman. The war once again makes her an outcast and forces her to recognize that she can no longer escape her Arab identity.

Among the treasures of this book are the glimpses we get along the way of buried historical events of special concern to Palestinians. For example we learn that it was the Iraqi contingent in the war of 1948 which saved Tulkarm, a town on the West Bank, from attacking Jewish forces; and she quotes an Israeli soldier who wonders why the Iraqis didn't proceed along the road to Tel Aviv which might have turned the tide of the war. We learn that the Israeli Knesset is built on the Palestinian town of Lifta and that the Holocaust museum also is built on confiscated Palestinian land.

Finally, surveying the wreckage that is the patrimony of Palestinians today, the author has the courage to raise the question of whether the Palestinian people will remain adrift as mere "flotsam and jetsam...the detritus of history...doomed to be fragmented and dispersed." Readers will have to decide such questions for themselves and Karmi's book provides them with a unique and marvelously told Palestinian story on which to base their judgment.

In Search of Fatima
G. Karmi's book presents a side of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that is seldom seen. Through the eyes of this little girl (8-9 years of age) we see the tragedy that has been inflicted on the stateless Palestinian people through no fault of their own. Ghada writes of her family's terrifying escape from Jerusalem under Israeli gunfire--leaving their home and possessions behind.

50 years later, Ghada does return to what is now Israel--and to
her city of Jerusalem. Briefly, she is able to visit her childhood home, now occupied by Jewish immigrants. She and her family were never compensated in any way for their
loss of home, possessions and country.

The author presents many insights about the culture in Jerusalem before the Israeli takeover. She describes the open, social interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims at that earlier time. She and her family are Muslim.