Two Opposing Views of Homelessness

The Pale of Settlement. Stories by Margot Singer. University of Georgia. 213 pages. 2008. $24.95.
A Map of Home. By Randa Jarrar. 292 pages. Other Press, 2008. $24.95
 
Reviewed by James Dalglish
 
Two works of fiction, one Jewish in origin by Margo Singer, the other Palestinian by Randa Jarrar, clash violently in tone – just as their nations do in reality – yet bear a common theme: the drift of homelessness.
 
The collection of stories The Pale of Settlement by Margo Singer is tied together by the character of one young woman Susan, an American Jew with relatives in Israel whose peregrinations back and forth between Israel and the US connect most of the stories and themes. She seems to be a sexually sought woman of uncertain commitment whether in her love affairs, place of residence or profession.
 
The collection is full of insights on its principal theme--the process of self-dissociation through displacement. Singer’s characters are Jewish Americans and Israelis for the most part, so Jewish problems and migration patterns of course concern her the most. She is an expert at describing the various shades of change and loss that afflict them but which apply to the typical expatriate as well.
 
The author also tries to situate her characters within a historical context so that their decisions and desires are seen in relation to real events. In “Hazor” she tries to connect the theme of the difficulty of digging out other people’s secrets to the archeology of Israel whose layers of rock reveal differing interpretations depending on you’re Arab or Jew. This is perhaps the most profound story.
 
Another impressive tale, “Expatriate,” features a Jewish family who originate in Israel but move to New York City (violating the stereotype) and lose their Israeliness while not becoming fully Jewish-American either. The family’s first-born, conceived in Israel, may have had an Arab father, but we never find out for sure. The most interesting thing about them though is not this suggested scandal but all the shades of time-and-space alienation the author discerns in their situation.
 
Singer writes well and often with lapidary polish but sometimes her metaphors go awry:
She [an infant] gazed at Leah as if there was a certain knowledge sealed inside her, like a crystal hidden in a geode sharp and bright... She lost that look with time of course, .... As self-consciousness came trawling like a fisherman’s long net across her mind.
 
With the first image you cheer, with the second (“fisherman’s long net”?) you wish she’d had a tougher editor.
 
In The Pale of Settlement, the Jewish characters are always off to someplace, most often to Israel, but also to Berlin or simply touring--in Nepal for example. Unlike in Saul Bellow’s or Philip Roth’s fiction there are few important non-Jewish characters in these stories; Jews and Israelis circulate, immigrate and become tourists largely among themselves.
 
The greatest crisis of conscience toward the Palestinian issue is experienced by Susan, working as a journalist in the story “Body Count” which refers to a real incident in the West Bank during the Second Intifada when the Israeli Army was accused of a massacre in the city of Jenin. Susan’s greatest worry is that she may have been suckered by the Palestinians into exaggerating the body count in the Jenin incident (the actual one was bad enough).
 
It might seem cruel and perverse to include in the same review a novel by an Israeli and a Palestinian, representatives of two warring tribes since time immemorial, but strangely enough the two works bear many resemblances. A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar is similarly obsessed with roots and the lack of them as its very ironic title suggests. You almost wish the two authors would sit down together to share notes, so identical are the themes that preoccupy both.
 
But in all probability they wouldn’t find much in common.
 
Whereas Singer writes a cool disciplined prose inherited from Flaubert, Randa Jarrar’s aggressive temperament expresses itself in hyperbole, slang and a good deal of unabashed obscenity. (This was shocking to me until I passed the book to a compatriot of the lead character I knew who said she liked precisely that about it.)
 
Yet Jarrar’s Palestinian family ranks as high on the scale of displaced sensibility as does Susan’s. The architect father Waheed is automatically an exile by virtue of being a Palestinian; her mother is half-Egyptian, half-Greek so Nabila, their daughter and heroine of the story, is sufficiently mixed in her origins to boast about it. They have lost their secure middle class status (like many Palestinians) but appealingly still have pretentions to artistic and intellectual accomplishment.
 
Narrated by the sharp tongued heroine Nabila, her family (previously expelled from Palestine) is forced out of Kuwait by Saddam’s invasion in 1990, escape to Egypt through Iraq (the most exciting episode), survive for a while in Alexandria, and finally move to America, landing in rural Texas no less, where the narrator succeeds in losing her virginity and getting into a ‘good school on the East coast.’
 
They are hardened travelers but not tourists. “On the plane to Egypt,” Jarrar writes, “I watched the tourists that surrounded us and thought how nice it would be to travel just for the sake of traveling, how nice it would be to leave one country for another willingly... for fun!”
 
You can hear the tone of the eternal aggrieved adolescent in almost every sarcastic line of Nabila’s account of her family’s woes. When she isn’t writing her eccentric, competitive essays, her typical interests are unsurprisingly sex, boys and pop music. We believe in her brilliance—though there are perhaps too many demonstrations of her wit.
 
The most touching theme in A Map of Home is the family’s search for precisely that--a home. Father Waheed often draws maps of the lost Palestine the ‘map’ of the title, so his daughter will remember a place where she never lived. A short episode takes the family back to Palestine for the funeral of a grandfather where Nabila sees how the original loss took place. Baba explains: “I lost my home ...and gained an education... which later became my home. That can also happen for you.”
 
The close and sometimes violent father-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. In anarchic America, however the father’s tyranny collapses, which he takes well, in a series of comic pratfalls. With the support of her mother, Nabila emerges from the Oedipal conflict without too many scars.
 
Both works offer a paradoxical mix of internationalized but still essentially tribal fiction. The title that has the better chance of escaping its tribal origins and addressing a wider audience is no doubt the boisterous, uninhibited A Map of Home.
 
Review originally published in Bloomsbury Review March-April 2009: page 17.
 
(In fact, Jarrar’s novel won some prizes, and the author gained a fair amount of fame – and was seen recently at the Dubai Lit Festival. I hope her second act is as good or better.)