What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem\'s powerfully imaginative novel.
Presenting a narrative that is often marginalized, Antoon\'s translation of the critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel..
The Book of Disappearance grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians.
Ariel\'s search for clues to the secret of the collective Disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.
Alaa is haunted by his grandmother\'s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland.
Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel\'s project and its national myth.
Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories.
Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event.
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem\'s powerfully imaginative novel
