Product Description

This is an acclaimed memoir about a childhood in Palestine, leading to exile after the Nakba, and a coming of age in 50s Britain. Ghada Karmi's acclaimed memoir relates 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 humor 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. Ghada's personal story is set against the continuing crisis in the Middle East. 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; History, however, refuses to oblige.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79858 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 452 pages

Review
Ghada Karmi's compelling and beautifully written narrative is more than a personal memoir. It enables the reader to understand and to empathise with the psychological dislocation of exile that continues to fuel the Palestinian cause. --Karen Armstrong, Independent

Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch, Ms Karmi's memoir of dislocation illustrates just how inseparable, for many people, the personal and political still can be. --Economist

Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch, Ms Karmi's memoir of dislocation illustrates just how inseparable, for many people, the personal and political still can be. --Economist

From the Back Cover
'Ghada Karmi's stunning memoir is remarkable. Extraordinarily well-written, it is the amazingly honest story of a Palestinian woman of exceptional self-awareness. Hers is a story of exile and displacement ... rich in detail and human experience. Karmi is excellent on the quality of family and even communal life in Mandatory Palestine ... she also has a wonderfully subtle way of showing how thousands of different ways the political and the personal intermesh, and this she does with a skill and insight that could be a novelist's envy.' Edward W. 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 books include, most recently, Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine.

Customer Reviews

A Palestian child raised in exile
This is a most blatantly honest account of the events in Palestine up to 1948 firstly seen throught the innocent eyes of a Palestinian Muslim child, a girl; how that little girl becomes a woman living in England in exile and contrary to her parents' wishes eagerly adopts her host country's culture, education and habits to the point of marriage. The confusion she feels as events unfold in the Middle East, through her adolescence to adulthood, is laid bare on the page and her accounts of British ignorance of the plight of Palestinians at that time are disturbing. (One wonders how much that has changed). Relationships between Arab men and Western women and vice versa are particularly well brought to our attention and her eventual return visit to her homeland is heartbreaking. Ghada Karmi has shown great courage in writing this book and I, for one, have learned a lot as well as thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I hope this will be published worldwide.

in search of identities
i read this well written book in 3 days. it works on many levels. one level is about personal identity. the author discusses her own arab identity, english identity and an identity neither fully arab nor english. her life story demonstrates how shifting identities are a product of experience and social environment.

she starts in palestine and then as a child is forced into exile with her family who settle in london via a short stay in damascus. an english identity develops in conflict with her native arab identity. this results in a "culture clash." on leaving london to attend bristol medical school she determines to complete the transformation to a dark skinned english girl. she marries an englishman against opposition from her family but the marriage is short lived resulting in divorce. her identity develops further, she becomes a political activist for the palestinian cause and travels back to the middle east.

and so i have titled this review "in search of identities."

overall, i enjoyed reading this book very much.

A truly human story
This is clearly a book written from the heart and is full of human emotion. The reader is therefore carried along as though on a fascinating foreign journey with an interesting and warm hearted companion. The factual detail provides a scholarly resource for students of the troubled modern history of Palestine and above all Gharda's story tells of the human tradgedies and the effect on individual lives of systematic ethnic cleansing from 1948 and continuing today. A very good and rewarding book.