In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story

In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story

by Ghada Karmi (Author)

Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 456
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 26 Sep 2002

ISBN 10: 1859846947
ISBN 13: 9781859846940

Media Reviews
Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch, Ms Karmi's memoir of dislocation illlustrates just how inseparable, for many people, the personal and the political still can be. -- Economist

Ghada Karmi's compelling and beautifully written narrative is more than a personal memoir. It enables the reader to understand and to empathise with the psychological dislocation of exile that continues to fuel the Palestinian cause ... --Karen Armstrong, Independent

Karmi's great achievement is to humanise the Palestinian predicament. Violent uprooting and exile have permanent psychological effects, which, as the Jewish people discovered, are not necessarily assuaged by the passage of time. We need counter-narratives like this, because we have recently learnt that it is not only parochial but also dangerous to ignore the pain and rights of others. -- Independent

This is an important memoir, beautifully written by an intelligent, sensitive woman that fills a void in studies of Zionism. It should help those of us who do not understand why growing numbers of Muslims and not a few Christians have lost faith with Western pretensions of fairness. -- Financial Times
Author Bio
Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem and trained as a doctor of medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Her previous books include The Ethnic Health Factfile and Jerusalem Today