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Title: Ishmael's Oranges

Author: Claire Hajaj

Narrator: Saul Reichlin

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-02-17

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

It's April 1948, and war hangs over Jaffa. One minute, seven-year-old Salim is dreaming of taking his first harvest from the family's orange tree; the next he is swept away into a life of exile and rage.

Seeking a new beginning in swinging '60s London, Salim falls in love with Jude. The only problem? Jude is Jewish.

Ishmael's Oranges follows the story of two families spanning the crossroad events of modern times and of the legacy of hatred their children inherit.

Members Reviews:

A gem of a book

âIshmaelâs Orangesâ is a gem of a book. I first spotted a mention of it while reading another of this authorâs works: a contemporary true-life story titled âRaqqa Road: A Syrian Escapeâ in Granta (No. 136, 2016). Ms. Hajaj has natural gift for writing, crisp and sure. In her few works to date, her storytelling and journalistic chops both come powerfully together.

This book is a rich tapestry of a novel with settings in London, Kuwait, Israel, and Palestine, depicting the families of two cultures in opposition, and brought searingly to life by a vivid cast of fully-imagined characters. Through the years, a slow, aching tragedy builds from a star-crossed marriage of two young people, the one Palestinian, the other Jewish. Salim and his wife Jude and their children, especially their son Marc, are gradually ripped apart by loyalty and bloodline and are at cross-purposes for imagining their futures. Salim, educated in London, chooses to return to the land of his birth. Marc, his son of âmixed heritageâ rejects the Palestinian ways and wants desperately to become a dancer. Jude is unable to convince her husband of his obligation to raise a multi-cultural family in harmony.

The author thus brings this explosive mix to life, as we watch a loving but irreconcilable marriage of two people who cannot avoid the conflicts of their entirely different ancestries. Salim leaves London soon after becoming a professional businessman, and takes his family with great hopes to Kuwait. But Salimâs contacts with his old relatives, now in Lebanon, soon become more than distracting. Jude struggles with identity in a land not her own, and strictures on her not previously imagined. The pleasure of reading this book is further enhanced by the harrowing back stories of each of their large, extended families. You are brought into armed struggle in the midst of the fragrant orange groves of long-ago Jaffa. You feel the plight and pain of both Arab and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

In Kuwait Salimâs intransigence, as much as Judeâs hidden feelings, forces more than one showdown. Eventually Jude secretly returns to England with her children, and for that, all are brokenâmost bitterly Salim who feels both the loss of family and the magnetic pull of his radicalized younger brother Rafan. As Jude and Salim implode in this marriage of irreconcilable cultures, their son Marc tragically internalizes the conflict. What hovers over their lives is Salimâs dream of retaking of his fatherâs land from the Israelis. His hope is to recover the familyâs modest house by the sea in Jaffa, originally his fatherâsâland that was literally stolen by the Israeli government in 1948 following the partition of Palestine.