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Daniel McGowan

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“The Scar of David” wins National Best Book Award

Deir Yassin Remembered Board member, Susan Abulhawa, author of “The Scar of David,” has won the 2007 award for Historic Fiction in this year's National Best Book Awards.  

Last month, Ms. Abulhawa was a featured presenter at The Wisconsin Book Festival and the Dutch edition of her book was released in Netherlands with a presale of 10,000 copies.

The Scar of David is historical fiction about a Palestinian family from the village of Ein Hod, which was emptied of its inhabitants by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948. It is told in the first person by Amal, who is born into that family in the Jenin refugee camp, where her family would eventually die waiting, or fighting, to return to their beloved Palestine.

The novel weaves through history, friendship, love, frayed identity, terrorism, exhaustion of the spirit, surrender, and courage.

During the family’s eviction from their ancestral village, Amal’s brother Ishmael is lost in the mayhem of people fleeing for their lives. Just a toddler at the time, Ishmael is raised by a Jewish family and grows up as David, an Israeli soldier. During the 1967 war, Amal’s eldest brother, Yousef, comes face to face with David, his brother the Jew. Yousef recognizes his brother by a prominent scar across David’s face. The title of this story takes its name from this scar.

The end is the beginning:  terrible suffering packaged by Western press into perfidious sound bites like “the Middle East Conflict” and “War on Terrorism.”  But through the course of this story, a would-be suicide bomber is given a name and a face of a man pushed to incomprehensible limits; an Arab girl of pious and humble beginnings escapes her destiny and lives the “American Dream,” which her soul cannot bear; an Israeli man becomes tangled in a truth he cannot reconcile, and his identity can find no repose but in the temporary anesthetic of alcohol; and a nation of destitute refugees, living under the general label of “terrorists,” emerges in the context of an unredeemed history.

This story reveals Palestinians in the fullness of their humanity as they teeter on the margins of life against a cruel military occupation, a corrupt leadership, an indifferent international community, and the undaunted will to take their place among the nations as human beings, worthy of human rights and the basic dignity of heritage.

www.scarofdavid. com