Dorit Rabinyan’s latest novel chronicles nine months in the lives of Liat, an Israeli woman, and Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two young adults come separately to New York to study and to make their fortunes. When they meet in the autumn of 2002, they fall immediately in love. But it isn’t long before problems between them arise. Ironically, it’s the problems that drive the story line and keep the narrative from becoming just another romance novel.
Growing up as an upper-middle-class Israeli, Liat knows little about the life of an average Palestinian like Hilmi. She naïvely thinks Hilmi’s family comes from the upper-middle-class and has always lived in a good Hebron neighborhood. But then she finds out that in 1967, at the end of the Six Day War, they moved to a poorer section of Ramallah. No, he tells her, they did not move; they were forced out of their homes and sent to refugee camps. Only later did they come to Ramallah, where, even now, they struggle to survive.
Liat’s own family is Jewish and had lived for centuries in Persia. They came to Israel just before World War II. Liat was born in Israel, the country that occupies the land belonging to Hilmi’s people. He learns that she served in the Israeli Defense Forces and asks whether she was one of the soldiers brutalizing Palestinian old people and children. No, she tells him: Everyone in Israel must serve in the army. She says she harmed no one and was a mere secretary working in an office far away from any military action.
She learns that he was put in jail—and immediately thinks he committed a major crime and wonders if he’s dangerous, perhaps a terrorist. No, he tells her: He was just a kid and had spray-painted Arab words on an Israeli building. How could they put him in jail just for that, she wonders?
She hopes for a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict; he says that the land is too small to be divided and, therefore, wants assimilation. But Liat, despite her hopes for reconciliation, fears that Israel will be subsumed by Arabs. And so it goes in this novel. Everything about All the Rivers is political. Dorit Rabinyan is herself an Israeli and the character of Liat is based on her own experience. She dedicates the book to Hassan Hourani (1974-2003), a Palestinian writer and artist she met in New York. The character of Hilmi is based on Hourani.
When All the Rivers came out in Israel (as Borderlife) in 2014, it won the Bernstein Prize and became a bestseller among left-wing Israelis. It became even more popular when, last year, education minister Naftali Bennett banned it from the high-school curriculum because, he believed, its subject matter could promote assimilation and intermarriage between Jews and Arabs. Teenagers could buy the book or borrow it from the library, but he didn’t want it included in the syllabus.
Bennett has a point—and besides, the subject of Israeli-Arab relations is covered in other works more suitable for young readers. But Rabinyan does a fine job telling her story. She shifts tenses from present to past, and shifts point of view, giving the novel a memoir-like quality. She also adds a sense of credibility by enmeshing her narrative in history and politics: Details propel the plot and add suspense; she avoids sentimentality by moving everything at a fast clip.
Through Hilmi, Rabinyan makes points about our common humanity. Hilmi is obsessed by art: At one point he declares that in his relationship to art and life, “reality is imitating my imagination.” He loves Liat but loves painting more. Early on, a gallery owner admires his work and commissions 40 paintings, but Hilmi completes fewer than 10 by story’s end. At first, Liat’s and Hilmi’s conflicts are solved in kiss-and-make-up fashion; but as All the Rivers progresses, and the intensity of their passion fades, their problems become darker and, as foreshadowing suggests, the darkness wins.
Diane Scharper teaches English at Towson University.
