Attentive readers of the Guardian's news pages will already know about Arabesques. A 1986 report from Jerusalem told readers of a first novel by a 36-year-old writer which was making a big stir: it had already sold 22,000 copies. (An equivalent figure in Britain would be a hardback sale of 270,000.) A very important contributory factor behind the sensation the book was causing was the fact that its author, Anton Shammas, was an Arab writing in Hebrew, his 'stepmother tongue'. Shammas describes himself as an 'Israeli Arab' - an ambiguous, problematic identity which is the subject of his novel.

LRB 5 January 1989 | PDF Download