Rachel and the Art of Living in Palestine
Metin Arditi’s *Rachel and Her People* is a gripping novel that spans 65 years of history, from the end of Ottoman rule to Israel in the 1980s
At dawn on 12 February 1917, a little girl wakes up on a straw mattress in a shack on the outskirts of Jaffa. She clutches an old blanket to protect herself from the cold and her anguish. In her mind’s eye, she sees a blurred image of her motionless sister and her father with his head bowed and his cheeks swollen. They are not there.
That very morning, in Jaffa, another little girl, Rachel, looks out of the window at the rivulets of rain running down the street and begins to daydream, until she discovers that the emaciated Ashkenazi man whom her father had refused to help the day before has died, as has one of his daughters.
‘With these immigrants, it’s never-ending,’ her mother had told her the previous evening at dinner, explaining why she had refused. Her parents were yahud awlad ‘arab: Arab Jews, Palestinians like her foster brother Munir, the son of two Catholic Arabs with whom they had for years shared a kitchen and the worries of life in a land where more and more Jews were pouring in from Northern Europe and Russia, fleeing the pogroms, arousing the anxieties of Arabs of every religion. Even more so than the non-Jews. ‘We’ve always shared everything with your parents. Your father is Munir’s godfather. We observe Shabbat with you. And you, you come with us to Mass every Sunday. Because we’re from here. Those who come from Europe don’t like to mix with us. And besides, there are too many of them; one day they’ll want to drive us out, you’ll see,’ Munir’s father tells Rachel, recalling the religious yet popular festival of Nabi Rubin, which everyone – Jews, Muslims and Christians – used to attend in August.
Rachel’s father, too, doesn’t like seeing all those moskubim turning up: ‘We were fine,’ he used to say, referring to the coexistence – that of Jews and Arabs in Palestine – which had lasted for four centuries. ‘Jews are looked down upon everywhere. In Russia, Poland and Romania, they’re being massacred. Here we live in peace. Have you ever seen an Arab lay a hand on a Jew in Palestine? I certainly haven’t. But if the invasion continues, we’ll become enemies.”
Metin Arditi, a writer of Sephardic Turkish origin, born in Ankara 28 years after the events with which his novel *i* (*Rachel and Hers*) opens, sets the first part of the story in Palestine under Turkish rule, just as British ships are approaching the coast, and Arab Jews fear that the Turks, regarding them as allies of the British, will subject them to the same fate as the Armenians. It is the twilight of Ottoman Palestine.
