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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
Top of the pile
90
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
89/100Critics
91/100Scholars
Author:
Nathan Thrall
Publisher:
Metropolitan Books
Date:
October 3, 2023
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaosâthe children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.
What The Reviewers Say
Magnificent.
He weaves scenes from the aftermath of the accident with passages of historical context that explain the physical and legal boundaries that shape the lives of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem.
...a compelling work of nonfiction, a book that is by turns deeply affecting and, in its concluding chapters, as tense as a thriller. It takes a single episode and, by gathering the testimony of everyone involved, even tangentially, it constructs not only a meticulously detailed account of that one event but perhaps the clearest picture yet of the reality of daily life in the occupied territories.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an important book, and one that closely examines the intricacies of injustice perpetrated on the Palestinian population by the Israeli government, its systems and plenty of its Jewish citizens. Yet it does so with an almost clinical remove.
