Book Review: Second Person Singular, by Sayed Kashua

Inspired partly by his own (unhappy) experience, Sayed Kashua is approaching in Second Person Singular (that I've read in the German translation) a different category of Palestinians that are rarely portrayed in the media: the Muslim Palestinians living in Israel with a very successful professional career. 

As the author himself, they successfully went through all the levels and requirements of the Israeli educational system, acquired good university grades, were able to overachieve while leaving completely or partially behind their ties with their old life in the villages. They are rich, speak perfect Hebrew, can purchase their goods from the same expensive suppliers as the rich Israeli. Are they in fact integrated? Are they really feeling as priviledges as their Jewish neighbours?

Kashua himself that has a long career as a journalist for the left wing Ha'aretz decided a couple of years ago to leave Israel (here is his letter of 'resignation' from the country published in 2014 as an essay in the German-speaking Spiegel). 

Both male characters in the book - Amir/Jonathan and the Lawyer - decided at a certain point in their lives to do their best - at the limit of legality - in order to achieve in the Israeli society. However, their efforts will not bring them farther than their community limits. At the macro-society level, they and their children will always be second class citizens. Breaking their ties with their history, and without any national/political ambition, they are outsiders for their families, and not interesting enough for the left who rather prefers to focus, sometimes with a certain level of irritating condescendence on the weak and poor ones, emotional thus confirming an implicit projection of inferiority/non-civilized status.

I've personally found the display of this relationship and dynamics very interesting and relatively new from cultural and sociological point of view.

The book has another running plot, which I expected to offer more from the literary point of view. The two main characters connect each other through a piece of paper that the Lawyer (this is how he is always mentioned in the story) found in an edition of The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy. The note was written by Amir/Jonathan to the current lawyer's wife while he courtshiped her for a short time. Through the note the two characters and their histories are introduced and this is the note that will bring both of them together. Like in Tolstoy's book, jealousy is a consuming feeling but it does not end up in passional crime (it would have confirmed the wildly emotional portrait assigned to Palestinians). The jealousy - for whom Tolstoy, the representant of an extreme mainstream within the Christian Orthodox Russian church, recommended as antidote the sexual abstinence - is the only connecter between The Kreutzer Sonata and Kashua's book. I would have expected a more creative literary exploration of this narrative line.

Besides this literary disappointment, Second Person Singular is eyes opening. I am curious to read more of Kashua's books and eventually better understand at a practical level the identity issues he raised in the literary form. 

Rating: 3 stars