The Inheritance

This sober, feminist novel from Palestinian author Khalifeh (Wild Thorns) bears witness to a young woman's search for cultural identity in modern day America and the Middle East. Zayna grew up in Brooklyn, but her father's romantic stories of home-Wadi al-Rihan in the West Bank-capture her imagination. When, at fifteen Zayna becomes pregnant, her father, in keeping with tradition, tries to kill her to reclaim his honor. Zayna flees to her maternal American grandmother in Washington, D.C., (Zayna's parents are long divorced). Sworn off forever by her father, Zayna grows up in D.C. The novel leaps forward to Zayna's thirties, by which point she has achieved success as chair of an anthropology department, though she feels empty, with ""a cold chill around and inside"". When her Uncle writes with news of her father's imminent death, inviting her to claim her inheritance, Zayna goes eagerly to the West Bank in hopes of alleviating her deep homesickness. There she meets her extended family, and the narrative shifts to the dramatic story of precarious family honor centering on Zayna's cousin, Nahleh, a 50-year-old woman who taught in Kuwait until the Gulf War. Though Khalifeh poignantly illustrates the intractable attitudes limiting Palestinian women in their chaotic homeland, her patchwork of high-drama events produces a novel with a disjointed, disorienting structure.