cover image Scattered Like Seeds

Scattered Like Seeds

Shaw J. Dallal. Syracuse University Press, $26.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-8156-0553-9

It is 1972 when Thafer Allam, a Palestinian-American lawyer and nuclear engineer seeks to navigate family, international politics and ethnic propaganda in a return to the Middle East after more than 20 years in the States. Allam left war-torn Jerusalem, his birthplace, in 1951 to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he has since built a law practice and a family. But following the death of his American wife, he is offered a position in Kuwait as counsel to the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). Longing to reconnect with his family and explore his roots, he seizes the opportunity to go back home. Others, however, suspect Allam's motives: they think he has returned to fight the Israelis, the way his father fought to drive the British out of Palestine in the 1930s. The political talk is fraught with the question of Palestine sovereignty, and Allam strives to temper the ethnic bigotry displayed--while not ignoring the anguish suffered--by both sides, Israeli and Arab. The complexity of this persistent conflict saps energy from such sketchily drawn subplots as the budding romance between Thafer and Suhaila, an Arab widow who would like to marry Thafer but is determined to stay in the Middle East. Two of Thafer's four children come to live with him in Kuwait; this development, and the vigor with which these American children take up the Arab cause, is not convincingly crystallized. Dallal packs much historical material into this debut novel, which does not commit itself exclusively to either history, politics, memoir or fiction but stands separately as an enigmatic voice speaking on a most difficult topic. (Jan.)