Star of the Sea

A Palestinian man leads a double life in Israel in Khoury’s beautiful and bewitching sequel to My Name Is Adam. The narrative recounts the early years of Adam Dannoun, before he became the New York City falafel seller portrayed in the first book. Born in Lydda in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he’s 15 when he leaves his mother’s house in Haifa. He leads a peripatetic life over the next few years, working at a Jewish mechanic’s garage and a Palestinian woman’s bakery until he begins studying Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa and finds in the subject a “mirror for his soul.” At the university, Adam, who is fair-skinned, changes his last name to Danon and assumes a Jewish identity. Over the subsequent decades, he tries to transform himself “into a man of many faces, origin unknown,” until he’s unwittingly implicated in an act of political violence. In lyrical and philosophical prose, Khoury masterfully depicts Adam’s ambivalence about his origins (“If you had asked Adam to tell you his mother’s story, he would have written pages and pages in white ink. That’s how he always imagined himself—writing white on white, rather than writing and then erasing the way writers do”). The result is a poignant and deeply humane exploration of Palestinian identity. (Nov.)