by Shanta Lee
The Maroons, a novel silenced 180 years ago, in 1844, has adopted our time—the year 2024—as its new era. The book—and the occasion—calls to mind these oft-quoted words, reiterated by Lucille Clifton: “I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
Some years ago, while a guest at Chile’s largest book fair, I came across a beautiful picture book about two boys, one Palestinian and the other Jewish, who share a birthday, and have each received two gifts: a soccer ball and a traditional scarf. The Palestinian boy wears a kaffiyeh, the Jewish boy a tallit. They spend time playing soccer in the park; eventually, they begin to play together, using their scarves to mark two goals.
Hours go by. It gets dark and they need to get home. By mistake, each takes with him the wrong item: the Palestinian boy takes the tallit, the Jewish boy takes the keffiyeh. When their families realize it, they become angry, and tell the boys to return the item first thing in the morning. That night, each boy has a nightmare about what he has heard from his parents and seen on the news. Next day, the boys return to the park with the tallit, the keffiyeh, and their soccer balls. Instead of just exchanging the items, they start doing what they love: playing soccer.
It isn’t surprising that the book was originally published in Chile—it not only has the largest Palestinian diaspora outside of the Arab world, but also a small thriving Jewish community. That year in Santiago, I met the book’s author, Juan Pablo Iglesias, and proposed to him and Alex Peris, the illustrator, that Restless Books do a trilingual version of the story: translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic. I thought the book, in the three languages, might reach different readers. It was a unique idea; trilingual children’s books are uncommon, but I never thought the road to publication would have so many obstacles.
Funding was one. For an independent nonprofit publisher like Restless Books, the passion we have for the works we choose to bring to an English-speaking audience needs to be matched by financial support from donors—both private and in the form of government and foundation-based grants. But that was not the most challenging obstacle. It took me years to persuade an Arabic translator to collaborate. I invited the best talents and received swift rejections. As innocent—perhaps the right word is quixotic—as the project may have appeared to be, some translators seemed to feel that collaborating on a book presented in both languages would be politically fraught.
When we finally found the right team (Randa Sayegh translated into the Arabic, Eliezer Nowodworski and Frieda Press-Danieli into the Hebrew), I was thrilled. In English, we titled the hardcover book Daniel and Ismail, the names of the two boys. It was released in 2019. It got a bunch of wonderful reviews but sales were modest. Personally, I was proud of the endeavor, but I couldn’t ignore the feeling that it had failed to find an audience.
Of course, there has been untold suffering in the Middle East between then and now. But the brutal war that began on October 7th—in which some 240 Israelis were taken hostage, and at least 1,200 Israelis and 13,300 Palestinians have been killed—is unparalleled in modern times. The vast majority of casualties are civilians; many of them, especially in Gaza, are children.
In early November, Miriam Udel, a scholar at Emory University whose research focuses on children’s literature, wrote an opinion essay in The New York Times in which she talks of the ways she presents the war to her child. She highlighted Daniel and Ismail as an example of the power of children’s literature to foster “more than just basic awareness of the similarities and differences in our shared humanity: It conjures a realm where we can imagine—together—something better than what is.” In other words, she wrote, the book subtly acknowledges “that a new generation will have to figure out how to make peace and that it is possible for children to lead us.”
If there is a better, more hopeful way to view children’s literature, I don’t know what it is. We are grateful to Miriam Udel for sharing her beautiful list and highlighting Daniel and Ismail for readers who may otherwise have never found it. The reaction has been astounding. We have sold out of every copy of the book we have. There is a growing list of back orders, so much so that we have decided to bring out a new paperback edition. And publishers in different parts of the globe are interested in printing it in Arabic, Hebrew, and their own language.
While a book cannot begin to solve the ongoing and enormous suffering in the Middle East, it can offer something that feels much too scant these days: hope. The written word—the oldest, most enduring form of communication—is magical: it can demean and even annihilate, but it’s better suited to make strangers into friends.
In this season of giving, we hope you will consider donating to Restless Books. We are eager to bring many more books like Daniel and Ismail into the world. We need you to help us reach as many readers as possible—readers like you.
Muchas gracias,
Ilan
We are delighted to partner with The Common in announcing the four finalists for the 2023 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
Since its inauguration in 2015, the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing has supported the voices of writers whose work brings fresh urgency to crossing cultural and linguistic divides, questions our sense of self in an increasingly interdependent world, and lends a voice to what it means to leave one home for another and why these stories need to be told. The winner will receive $10,000 and publication with Restless Books. This year’s judges—Grace Talusan, Jiaming (Andy) Tang, and Ilan Stavans—have selected the following four finalists.
How to be UnMothered by Camille U. Adams
Can abandonment be good luck if a mother turns out to be even worse? Narrated in poetic prose and the rhythmic patois of Trinidad and Tobago, How to be UnMothered reflects upon the multifaceted cruelties of a mother who subjects her daughters to neglect. It journeys from the aquamarine seas and lush greenery of Trinidad and Grenada to England, Canada, and New York City. It explores Caribbean history from pre-colonialism to the present, and questions what the author sees as the chokehold of African spirituality. In the end, it affirms the role of choice in determining multi-generational legacy.
A Broken Russia Inside Me by A. Molotkov
Do we shape circumstances or are we shaped by them? A Broken Russia Inside Me is the story of a writer born into a totalitarian world and a tale of forging an identity outside what was given. At the age of twenty-two, Molotkov makes the decision to emigrate and, with $343 in cash, build a new life in the United States while the Soviet Union collapses and Russia is claimed by increasingly ominous leaders. He investigates what it means to be from a place he’s ashamed of and seeks to eradicate from within himself while also exploring how his choices and relationships still influence his attitudes and social responsibilities.
Unexploded Ordnance by Catharina Coenen
A collection of essays that interrogates what it means to come from a place where horror originates, and how terror can shape lives across generations, sometimes through our very DNA. Coenen, a doctor of biology, grew up in Germany and immigrated to the United States as an adult. Her mother, who had been five at the end of WWII, never talked about sheltering in basements while bombs shook the walls, fleeing burnt-out cities stuffed in the baggage net of overcrowded trains, or hiding her own mother under her sister’s crib during the mass rapes committed by invading French soldiers. After Coenen falls in love with a woman and begins to disentangle her twenty-year marriage to a man, the wartime anecdotes her grandmother shared throughout her childhood reappear like small grenades. With time, she comes to understand how historical threats to anyone labeled as “different”—Jewish people, disabled people, gay people, political dissidents—still bend her life, just as those threats persist across borders today.
Radio Big Mouth by Ana Hebra Flaster
Ana Hebra Flaster was five years old when her family fled post-revolutionary Cuba. They landed in a New Hampshire mill town, but she grew up Cuban-style, in a bright yellow duplex full of viejos—cousins, dogs, canaries. The women in her family worked hard to keep their Cuban identity alive, and they created a new family story: they’d won. They’d beaten Castro and Communism. Flaster believed those stories. But as an adult, when her own daughter turned five, a deep depression appeared. What traumas had lodged themselves in her when her family was uprooted from Cuba? For many refugees, she writes, refugee-dom never ends, even when you’ve scrubbed your accent and learned to like food that tastes like it was washed first. This book is a love letter to that story.
Congratulations to Camille U. Adams, Catharina Coenen, Ana Hebra Flaster, and A. Molotkov! We are deeply grateful for your work. Many thanks as well to the judges, who brought much insight and heart to their deliberations, and to everyone who shared their writing with us this year.
Read excerpts from all of the finalists over at The Common!
And please stay tuned for news of our 2021 New Immigrant Writing Prize–winning memoir, An Unruled Body by Ani Gjika, whose book is exactly two months away from its publication day! Preorder a copy now, and be sure to check out all the past prizewinners on our website!
