In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story

by Ghada Karmi (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $31.50

  Ghada Karmi's acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, the flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948, and coming of age in the coffee-bars of Golders Green, the middle-class Jewish quarter in North London. A gentle humor describes the bizarre and sometimes tense realities that mask her life in 'Little Tel Aviv' and, later, her struggle, like that of many other women in the late fifties, to get a university grant to study medicine. Ghada's personal story is set against the continuing crisis in the Middle East. In Search of Fatima reminds us that the only crime the Palestinians committed was to be born in Palestine. Its author, a committed physician, is desperate for the wounds to heal; History, however, refuses to oblige.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $26.95

  This is a memoir of Ghada Karmi's life: her childhood in Palestine, the flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948 and coming-of-age in the coffee bars of Golders Green, the middle-class Jewish quarter in North London. With humour, she describes the bizarre and sometimes tense realities that mask her life in Little Tel Aviv and, later, the struggle for her, as for many other women in the late 1950s, to get a university grant to study medicine. The book is set against the backdrop of the continuing crisis in the Middle East. As Karmi grew older, and especially after the 1967 war, memories of the lost homeland in Palestine began to haunt her and her anger grew at what she perceived as the self-deception that justified the action of the Israeli government. This book reflects her experiences of displacement, loss and nostalgia for a vanished past, arguing that the only crime the Palestinians committed was to be born in Palestine.