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• Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation Harper Perennial (New York, NY), 2017
• Sadness Is a White Bird ( novel) Atria Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. Sadness is a white bird : a novel LCCN 2017024243 Type of material Book Personal name Rothman-Zecher, Moriel, author. Main title Sadness is a white bird : a novel / Moriel Rothman-Zecher. Edition First Atria Books hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York City : Atria Books, 2018. Projected pub date 1802 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781501176265 (hardcover : acid-free paper) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Kingdom of olives and ash : writers confront the occupation LCCN 2017276068 Type of material Book Personal name Chabon, Michael author. Main title Kingdom of olives and ash : writers confront the occupation / Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, editors ; Moriel Rothman-Zecher, associate editor. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Harper Perennial, 2017 Description ix, 434 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780062431783 CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Amazon -

  Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an American-Israeli writer, poet, and novelist. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Arabic and political science. A recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature, his work has been published in The New York Times, Haaretz, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. Moriel lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with his wife, Kayla, and their dog, Silly Department. Read more at TheLefternWall.com and follow him on Twitter @Moriel_RZ.

• Kirkus Reviews - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/moriel-rothman-zecher/#continue_reading_post

  Moriel Rothman-Zecher
  Author of SADNESS IS A WHITE BIRD
  Interviewed by James McDonald on February 15, 2018
  On the surface of things, Moriel Rothman-Zecher is very similar to the protagonist of his debut novel, Sadness Is a White Bird. Both he and his character, Jonathan, were born in Israel, yet both spent most of their lives living in America. Both moved back to a northern Israeli Jewish town at the age of 16 to finish high school and prepare to join the military—something almost all Jewish and Druze Israelis must do at the age of 18. “While I don't see the book any more as an autobiographical sketch,” Rothman-Zecher says, “the timeline of Jonathan's life very much mirrors my own.” There is however, one major point of divergence: Jonathan enlists in the Israeli military, and Rothman-Zecher never did.

  The parallels between their lives is very much intentional, and very natural given the genesis of the story. Initially, Rothman-Zecher conceived of this project as a non-fictional account of his own experience. After deferring enlistment in order to spend time studying in the United States, and then after experiencing the 2008-9 war between Israel and Gaza from abroad, he decided to publicly refuse to enlist. As a result, he spent a short time in military prison. While it is more common today to see Israelis, especially from among the left-wing, refuse to serve, it’s still an infrequent occurrence, and tends to elicit quite visceral reactions—the culture and ethos of the Israeli Defense Force is deeply embedded in all aspects of Israeli society, and refusing to serve is seen by many as a betrayal of the state and the Jewish people. Yet despite his passionate beliefs surrounding the conflict and the military, Rothman-Zecher says that, as his non-fictional account progressed, it felt hollow.

  “Then I came to this question,” he says. “What if a few things had been different? Were it not for a few random events in my life, I would have enlisted. I was like everyone else. I was like all of my friends. I was excited. It was exciting to talk about which color berets looked the sexiest, how fast you needed to run to get into a certain unit—and yeah sure, I was also liberal, I was also generally supportive of the Palestinians and generally thought they should have freedom and justice and rights, generally supportive of the two-state solution. But it felt like two entirely different issues. There was the issue of joining the military on the one hand, and the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the other.”

  Eventually, it was the question about relationships with Palestinians that would come to lie at the heart of Rothman-Zecher’s novel. On the verge of entering the military, Jonathan befriends twins Laith and Nimreen. They smoke joints on the beach, they talk poetry and they go on hikes. For Jonathan, his relationship with them is increasingly marked by the confusing interplay of friendship and lust and love.

  Continue reading >

  Laith and Nimreen are Palestinian, but they’re Palestinian citizens of Israel. On paper, all three can vote in the same elections and travel to the same places. But despite everything they share, despite their feelings for each other, the odds are stacked against them, because Jonathan is Jewish, and Laith and Nimreen are Palestinian, and they live in a world defined by the conflict between their peoples.

  Rothman-Zecher cover “I went into this book not knowing whether genuine love and friendship is enough in the face of all the history, and the politics, and the realities pulling people apart in Israel and Palestine,” Rothman-Zecher says. “I neither started nor ended with an answer, and that's something I'm actually really excited about, to hear from others what answers they came to or what questions they came away with.”

  In the course of writing his novel, Rothman-Zecher had a lot of time to reflect on his own decisions, to take a closer look at some of the truths he once saw as immutable. He doesn’t regret his decision to refuse. But one big question, for both Rothman-Zecher and Jonathan, is the idea that a moral and self-aware soldier would be able to mitigate the worst effects of the Israeli occupation.

  “When I decided to refuse, I made the decision that that's not true,” Rothman-Zecher says. “People told me, ‘Look, you speak Arabic, you don't hate Palestinians, you could be the one who makes things easier, who makes sure your comrades aren't acting out of line.’ And I made the decision not to believe that. At the end of the day, you're still serving, and your intentions don't matter. But when I thought about it, when I really zoomed back from myself, I think I came to the conclusion that, I'm not sure. I think that's what I believe, but maybe that's not true. Maybe there are circumstances where the moral soldier could step in. It was a relief to be able to write the complexities of that question without giving a blow-off answer or a super self-assured answer. Because, like with so much about this conflict, I don’t think I know what the absolute truth is. I’d be skeptical of anyone who said they did.”

  James McDonald is a British-trained historian and a New York–based writer.

• Daily Californian - http://www.dailycal.org/2018/03/05/moriel-rothman-zecher/

  MONDAY, MARCH 5, 2018
  The autobiography that never happened — an interview with ‘Sadness is a White Bird’ author Moriel Rothman-Zecher
  MORIEL ROTHMAN ZECHER/COURTESY
  BY REBECCA GERNY | STAFFLAST UPDATED MARCH 5, 2018

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  Some stories demand to be told. Whether because of their emotional significance, their entertainment value or their relevance to an author’s life, certain stories refuse to remain a mere sticky-note idea.

  For Moriel Rothman-Zecher, “Sadness is a White Bird” is that story. Rothman-Zecher, primarily a nonfiction and op-ed writer, explains that he uses writing as a way to make sense of the world and his life through his blog, multiple op-eds in the New York Times and his associate editorship on the anthology “Kingdom of Olives and Ash” — a compilation of essays documenting the 50-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

  Though most of his writing is partisan opinion pieces on the ongoing and historical conflict in Israel and Palestine, Rothman-Zecher, an Israeli Jew, has never told his own story. Born in Jerusalem but raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Rothman-Zecher’s new novel “Sadness is a Yellow Bird” was going to be a nonfiction, personal account of the conflict, but soon, he decided he wanted to look past himself.

  “I was a little bored, frankly, and a little tired of telling the same stories again and again — telling exactly what happened, exactly what I saw, exactly what this person said, exactly what this person said, exactly what I felt or believed in response to that,” Rothman-Zecher said in an interview with The Daily Californian.

  The novel instead follows Jonathan, a 19-year-old Israeli Jew who — though ideologically and personally torn — eventually makes the decision to join the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF. But for Rothman-Zecher, who refused to join the IDF, “Sadness is a White Bird” became an alternate, fictional version of his own life.

  Unlike Jonathan, Rothman-Zecher attend college in the United States and thus was able to postpone his IDF draft date until he was 23, during the 2008-09 Gaza War. When it finally came time to make a decision, Rothman-Zecher was torn.

  “Is this something that I’m doing fully in line with my own conscious, fully in line with my own beliefs?” he asked himself. “And was this something I could say to my Palestinian friends, my Palestinian colleagues — could I look them in the eye and say, ‘I believe I’m serving in this military … because it is just and it is necessary’?”

  Ultimately, his answer was no. “I couldn’t justify serving even a single day in the occupied territories, to myself, or especially to my Palestinian friends,” he explained.

  But this is the story of Jonathan, who eventually does decide to join the IDF during the course of “Sadness is a White Bird.” Rothman-Zecher could then take literary license to change his childhood and explore what could have happened, whom he could have met and what relationships he might have had. Heartbreakingly real and breathtakingly honest, these relationships transform the novel from an ideological coming-of-age narrative to a poetic love story.

  Yet Rothman-Zecher never had any Palestinian friends when he was in high school. It was only when he returned to Israel during his college summers and stayed in a Palestinian village within Israel that he experienced the culture that, despite having lived in Jerusalem, he had never interacted with before. It was there that he developed an essential question asked by the novel.

  “With genuine friendship and genuine love and genuine interpersonal connection, would that be enough to push back against the huge weight of history and politics and society bearing down on every single person in that land?” he recalled asking himself.

  Often in complex, identity politics-based conflicts, there is a misconception that if only the two sides could get to know each other and recognize the complexity of each other’s narratives, then peace would be possible. But Rothman-Zecher is clear: This is a simplification. Through his novel, he explores how young Israelis are forced to grapple with their individual contribution to Israel — a nation with such a contensious political history — and how peace could even be possible. Sadly for his characters, the weight of history is just too heavy.

  SIMON AND SCHUSTER/COURTESY
  SIMON AND SCHUSTER/COURTESY

  “Even friendship and even love is not sufficient to stop the flow of — to stop the devastating inertia of — history and violence and separation and everything swirling around them,” he said.

  Rothman-Zecher does not just explore this idea on a political level, but on a deeply personal level as well. “For this story to work and for the story to get to a level that was deeper than a political polemic or deeper than just a thought experiment, the characters needed to be full characters and sexuality and love and desire and romance and goofiness and pot-smoking and fear and joke telling and all of those things that are so present in a 17-year-old’s life, in an 18-year-old’s life and really in all of our lives,” he said.

  It therefore makes sense that the novel is in first person. But this worried Rothman-Zecher, who tried to make sure his voice neither became Jonathan’s nor transformed the novel into a poorly-masked autobiography. To do so, he had to get himself out of the way.

  “I think that (the characters) developed most when I got my conscious self out of the way and let the streams of interactions over my life and memories … form these characters out of this sort of ether of experience and memory and sounds and words that all of us swim in,” he said.

  Though he wrote a highly ideological novel, Rothman-Zecher’s focus wasn’t on politics. His goal was “to write a book in which the deep, weird, pot-smoking, lustful, goofy, bus-riding, humanity of Israeli Jews and of Palestinians is taken seriously.”

  “There’s a feeling that only one of those, only people from one of those sides can be fully humanized,” he said. “Sadness is a White Bird” works to change that misperception.

  “The specifics of (serving in the IDF) might be foreign, but the experiences of it, the dilemmas, the feelings of pride, the feelings of lust, the feelings of confusion, the loyalties to family, the contradicting poles between two groups of friends, the ambition, the fear, all those things need not be foreign for someone who’s never been to Israel,” Rothman-Zecher said.

  Regardless of one’s opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nationality, gender or age, Rothman-Zecher simply wants to start conversations about humanity. He hopes to compel readers to to engage critically with the conflict and remember that no matter where they come from — no matter what side they may be on — everyone shares in the same experiences of being human.

  Rebecca Gerny covers literature. Contact her at rgerny@dailycal.org.

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/moriel-rothman

  Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an American-Israeli writer and activist. He was born in Jerusalem, raised in Ohio, and is back in Jerusalem. He blogs independently on www.TheLefternWall.com on issues of militarism, racism, occupation, violence, justice and peace. All opinions expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization or group.

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/18/writing-fiction-shadow-jerusalem/

  QUOTED: "This novel, I think, can be categorized as a work of realistic fiction, at least insofar as its histories and logics and languages and politics and characters were intended as portraits and sketches of the realities I saw and felt in Israel-Palestine. But the book was also an escape from the real Israel-Palestine, and especially from the city of Jerusalem, where I was born."

  Writing Fiction in the Shadow of Jerusalem
  By Moriel Rothman-Zecher January 18, 2018 ARTS & CULTURE

  I started writing fiction while a cloud of death and mourning hung heavy over Jerusalem. To be clear: death and mourning are always hovering in the air over Jerusalem. It is not a joyful city. But in this period, beginning in early fall of 2015, death and mourning were increasingly part of the daily reality of almost every Jerusalemite I knew, and were spreading elsewhere, throughout Israel-Palestine.

  In late September of that year, a car driven by a sixty-four-year-old Israeli man named Alexander Levlovitz was stoned by a number of Palestinian youths in Jerusalem. He crashed into a pole and was killed. A few days later, an Israeli couple were shot and killed by Palestinian gunmen while driving in the West Bank with their four children, who were not physically harmed. In the days and weeks that followed, the Israeli military began a trigger-happy campaign of suppressing any form of Palestinian uprising, whether armed or not. By mid October, some two hundred Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces—some of them armed with lethal weapons and attempting to carry out attacks; some of them throwing stones at army posts, vehicles, or checkpoints; some of them entirely unarmed; some of them small children, like thirteen-year-old Abdel Rahman Obeidallah. During the same period, twenty-eight Israelis had been stabbed, axed, run over, or shot to death by Palestinians, and an Eritrean refugee named Haftom Zarhum was beaten to death in a bus station after a group of Israelis mistakenly identified him as the Palestinian perpetrator of a shooting attack that had just taken place there.

  During that period, like many other Israeli Jewish Jerusalemites, I was, when I left my house, in a state of hypervigilant anxiety that sometimes morphed into genuine fear. Unlike many other Israeli Jewish Jerusalemites, I also visited Palestinian colleagues in the occupied eastern parts of the city to see how they were faring in the face of the increasingly draconian crackdowns.

  That was how I spent my afternoons. But in the mornings, I was neither glancing nervously around the light-rail or the sidewalks, nor listening to stories about flying checkpoints and teens being dragged off into police vehicles at random. I was elsewhere: I was deep in the fictional world of a novel that I hadn’t planned to write. (I’d thought I’d write nonfiction; within six weeks, I’d written the first draft of a novel, at just over a hundred thousand words.) Those mornings spent writing fiction, I think, were simultaneously a way of grappling with the latest wave of violence and death taking place in and around Jerusalem, and a way to escape it.

  This novel, I think, can be categorized as a work of realistic fiction, at least insofar as its histories and logics and languages and politics and characters were intended as portraits and sketches of the realities I saw and felt in Israel-Palestine. But the book was also an escape from the real Israel-Palestine, and especially from the city of Jerusalem, where I was born. For part of the book, which is set largely in and around the northern city of Haifa, the story is about a friendship between a young Jewish Israeli man, Jonathan, and two Palestinian twins, Laith and Nimreen, both citizens of Israel. Later in the book, their friendship ends up crumbling under the weight of history and politics, but still it is a friendship that at least had a chance to take root and grow into something actual and genuine. To have set such a friendship against the backdrop of modern Jerusalem would have changed the genre of this book from an attempt at realistic fiction to a work of whimsical—or delusional—fantasy. Perhaps that’s a bit hyperbolic: there are, certainly, some genuine friendships between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem. But in my experiences in Jerusalem, those friendships are often swallowed by the city before they even have a chance to sprout.

  That winter, in early 2016, my partner and I flew to visit family in Berkeley, California, and to get out of Jerusalem for a little while. A few days before we arrived, we got an email from my aunt saying that she really wanted us to meet a Palestinian couple—also from Jerusalem! Also visiting Berkeley! Also trying to get away from everything in Jerusalem, at least for a little while. We weren’t sure that they’d be thrilled to spend their time away from Jerusalem with two Israeli Jews, but we reached out nonetheless. The couple—let’s call them Murid and Sawsan—were incredibly gracious, and while our schedules didn’t align in Berkeley, they insisted we come over to their place in Beit Hanina, in East Jerusalem, when we got back. A few weeks after that, we got in a taxi to visit them. (We didn’t want to drive, afraid of getting lost, of being recognized as Jews or being seen as encroaching settlers, and of what might happen then.) The taxi dropped us off outside of Murid and Sawsan’s apartment building, and we went upstairs, where we proceeded to have one of the nicest evenings we’d had in a very long time. We talked some about politics on a zoomed-out level, of course, about how awful it all was, but also about life in general and about California and about family. Toward the end of the evening, they told us they wanted to leave Jerusalem. They didn’t know how to keep their children, three incredibly sweet young boys, safe from the violence—both that which could be done to them and that which they could do. We nodded, tears in our eyes. We didn’t have children of our own but planned to. As members of the Israeli side in this conflict, we were cognizant of the imbalances in power and in statistics, but their expression of fear had a familiar timbre, taste, bodily weight, and we told them this, and they nodded. At the end of the evening, we prepared to take a taxi home, and they said they’d drive us. We tried to demur, but they insisted. As we crossed the invisible but highly palpable border from East Jerusalem into West Jerusalem, the conversation in the car grew strained. I noticed, at a certain point, right before we drove into our affluent West Jerusalem neighborhood, that Sawsan’s hands were shaking on the steering wheel. They dropped us off, and we thanked them too many times, and we all said we absolutely had to get together again, and I think we meant it. But this was Jerusalem: we didn’t see them again.

  After a while, we heard that they’d moved to Canada.

  *

  Jerusalem is a city of death and mourning and violence and separation.

  The novel I wrote, like most novels, is a novel about death and mourning. It is about separation and violence and power and history and politics. But it is also a novel about joy and silliness and nineteen-year-olds getting high on the beach and waxing poetic, and it’s about love and about friendship. I set it far away from Jerusalem, to allow the joy and silliness and friendship at least a little space to grow. Throughout the novel, Jerusalem only appears three or four times and plays no directly significant role in the narrative. But its shadow, I think, hangs heavily over the entire story, like it does over the entirety of Israel-Palestine.

  *

  I’m writing this from Ohio. We moved away from Jerusalem last fall, moved away from Israel-Palestine entirely. Most days, I feel a measure of guilt for having left, and an equal or greater measure of relief. I’ve continued writing fiction, but the new stories are set much farther away from Jerusalem than Haifa. My partner and I are expecting our first baby this spring. For a long time, I’d thought that we’d send our children to the one integrated Hebrew-Arabic bilingual school in Jerusalem. But I also know that a child is not an ideological project. Watching Jerusalem from afar, it is less clear to me that we will choose to bring our child or children back to the city we left.

  Maybe, at some point, we will take our child to meet Murid and Sawsan’s children up in Canada. Maybe they’ll be able to play together without the shadow of uniforms and checkpoints and preordained violence hanging over their small heads. Maybe here, Jerusalem’s shadow—its languages, its histories, its idiosyncrasies, its beauty, its torment—would connect us, rather than all but ensure that we remained apart. In many ways, hundreds and hundreds of miles of North American sprawl does feel like a shorter distance to travel than the five miles separating our old homes in East and West Jerusalem.

  Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an Israeli American writer. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, will be published by Atria Books in February 2018.

• Shelf Awareness - http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3196#m39530

  Reading with... Moriel Rothman-Zecher

  photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
  Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an American Israeli writer, poet and novelist. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Arabic and political science. He's a recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature, and his work has been published in the New York Times, Haaretz, the Paris Review's Daily and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel Sadness Is a White Bird (Atria, February 13, 2018), and he lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife, Kayla, and their dog, Silly Department.

  On your nightstand now:

  On the novel front, I just finished Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, and just started Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney. The Good Lord Bird by James McBride is up next.

  In terms of nonfiction, I am rereading segments of a beautiful, meditative book about running and death called Poverty Creek Journal by Thomas Gardner and the collected writings of Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork.

  I'm also reading a lot of poetry these days: American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav; The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin; Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis; A Well of Milk in the Middle of a City (Hebrew: Be'er Halav B'Emtza Ir) by Hezy Leskly.

  And I am slowly but surely making my way through Ulysses by James Joyce--I'm a little over halfway through it, and I do intend to persevere.

  Favorite book when you were a child:

  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon was one of my favorite books when I first read it at age 12, and remains one of my favorites to this day. I still remember the exquisite mixture of astonishment, relief and joy I felt upon reading Chabon's depictions of Joe Kavalier, who was described as having an "aquiline nose" and as being handsome. The fictional character of Joe Kavalier did a lot for my real-life self-confidence as a big-schnozzed--ahem, aquiline-nosed--preteen.

  Your top five authors:

  "Top five" feels too daunting--but if I may wordsmith a little and reframe this question as "five of my tops," I'll nominate this quintet:

  James Baldwin
  Ben Lerner
  Eimear McBride
  Zadie Smith
  David Foster Wallace

  Book you've faked reading:

  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. For some odd reason, in early high school, I backed myself into something of corner by saying that I'd read The Catcher in the Rye--and hated it. When I was 19 or 20, I finally read it. And liked it just fine.

  Book you're an evangelist for:

  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I don't often write in-depth book reviews (although I do have a Google doc that I share with close friends in which I recommend, in three or four lines, my favorite 25 books I read each year), but after reading Infinite Jest six years ago, I wrote this review/rave/recommendation.

  Book you've bought for the cover:

  They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib. I was immediately drawn to the defiant, tautological title, and to the odd, enthralling cover image of a slightly befuddled-looking wolf wearing a thick gold chain and a red tracksuit--at once vulnerable and strange, fierce and earnest. (The essays were excellent--and the author is also from Ohio!)

  Book you hid from your parents:

  Well, an edition of the Kama Sutra that I somehow got my 12-year-old hands on. Maybe also Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne.

  Book that changed your life:

  There are so many, but I think, for this one, I'll go with Born to Run by Chris McDougall. I'd estimate that 17 out of every 20 books I read are novels, but this work of nonfiction was my gateway into the joys and quirks and possibilities of long-distance running. Running, in turn--and in particular trail running, with marathons and ultramarathons thrown in along the way to keep me moving--is how I keep sane, sharp, joyful and well--mentally, physically, spiritually. I do a lot of my writing--revising, plotting, editing, dreaming--while on the trails. And there was a lot of resonance between the experiences of running my first ultramarathon and writing my first novel.

  Favorite line from a book:

  I adore the following passage from Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. It is, in general, an exquisite, delightful book. I won't go into its plot for fear of ruining the wondrous surprise this book delivers, but I will say that reading it made me a better and wiser and wider person. Anyhow, the passage is from a section in which the narrator Rose's family are discussing the SATs:

  " 'I remember Rose's scores.' Peter whistled appreciatively. 'I didn't know how impressed I should have been. That's a hard test, or at least I thought so.' Such a sweetheart. But don't get attached to him; he's not really part of the story."

  Five books you'll never part with:

  A signed galley of Jacqueline Woodson's novel Another Brooklyn. A highly annotated version of A Land of Two Peoples, which is a collection of Martin Buber's writings and letters edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. My tattered and scribbled in edition of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. My copy of Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar. An old, gray volume, Short Stories by Leo Tolstoy (I liked the stories well enough, but this particular copy is mostly important because of the fact that I first scribbled Kayla Zecher's phone number on the inside cover, back when I was Moriel Rothman).

  Book you most want to read again for the first time:

  Lore Segal's Her First American. It is such a marvelously strange, moving, funny and beautiful book, and each page contained new surprises, heartbreaks, insights and idiosyncrasies. The book is packed with understated, brilliant dialogue, and the details of Ilka and Carter's relationship--and of the world bustling and flailing around them--make this one of my favorite novels.

QUOTED: "Rothman-Zecher has an unusual way with words, giving lovely, fresh descriptions of desire, violence, and injustice."

Sadness is a White Bird
Publishers Weekly. 264.52 (Dec. 18, 2017): p96.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Sadness is a White Bird

Moriel Rothman-Zecher. Atria, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5011-7626-5

Rothman-Zecher's outstanding debut takes its title from a Mahmoud Darwish poem: "Sadness is a white bird that does not come near a battlefield." On the cusp of adulthood, Jonathan returns with his family from America to Israel, which means that soon he must serve in the Israeli army. Having been told the tragic stories of his Jewish ancestors, this service to his people is something he dreamed of as a boy. But after meeting the daughter and son of his mother's Palestinian friend, twins named Nimreen and Laith, whom Jonathan dictates his story to, the lens through which he views the world changes. In poetic, epistolary prose, Rothman-Zecher describes Jonathan's growing love for Nimreen ("the tangled curtain of her blackbird hair") and for Laith, "voice soft like your sister's, loamy like the ground," whose sweet, lazy disposition provokes deep affection and loyalty. Against Nimreen's wishes, Jonathan joins the paratroopers, with tragic consequences that cause Jonathan to spiral into what may or may not be insanity. Rothman-Zecher has an unusual way with words, giving lovely, fresh descriptions of desire, violence, and injustice. (Feb.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sadness is a White Bird." Publishers Weekly, 18 Dec. 2017, p. 96. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520578831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ab6d0dac. Accessed 10 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A520578831

QUOTED: "a passionate, poetic coming-of-age story set in a mine field, brilliantly capturing the intensity of feeling on both sides of the conflict."

Rothman-Zecher, Moriel: SADNESS IS A WHITE BIRD
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rothman-Zecher, Moriel SADNESS IS A WHITE BIRD Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 13 ISBN: 978-1-5011-7626-5

A very young Israeli soldier whose best friends are Palestinian twins is driven to the breaking point by conflicting loyalties.

Rothman-Zecher's debut begins in the "fluorescent glow of a jail cell" just days after its narrator's 19th birthday. In an epistolary narrative addressed to his friend Laith, Jonathan pours out his heart and sorts through his past. Two years earlier, before his senior year of high school, Jonathan's family returned to Israel after a long stint in Pennsylvania. The family's history--his grandfather left the Greek city of Salonica before the Nazis deported all its Jews to concentration camps; other family members did not--has given Jonathan a profound sense of the importance of the Jewish state. Thus he was eagerly awaiting the beginning of his military service when he met Laith and his sister, Nimreen, tall, brilliant, cool Palestinian twins, students at Haifa University, both with eyes "the color of a sidewalk after a misty summer rain." Charmed and amused by the boy and his really pretty decent command of Arabic, they take him under their wings, and all more or less fall in love with each other. Over a long series of adventures, bus trips, nights on the beach, marijuana-fueled conversations, and poetry readings, Jonathan begins to see the occupation through the eyes of his friends and grasps that their family history is no less tragic than his own. Then his draft date arrives, and before long his unit is sent as a police presence to a demonstration in the Territories. "Today, you're going to put down a riot," their commander says. What happens that day is the reason Jonathan is in jail, the reason for this cri de coeur to his beloved friend Laith.

A passionate, poetic coming-of-age story set in a mine field, brilliantly capturing the intensity of feeling on both sides of the conflict.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rothman-Zecher, Moriel: SADNESS IS A WHITE BIRD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514267865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3e68477. Accessed 10 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A514267865

"Sadness is a White Bird." Publishers Weekly, 18 Dec. 2017, p. 96. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520578831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ab6d0dac. Accessed 10 Mar. 2018. "Rothman-Zecher, Moriel: SADNESS IS A WHITE BIRD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514267865/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3e68477. Accessed 10 Mar. 2018.

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/sadness-is-a-white-bird
  Word count: 1056

  QUOTED: "At once a celebration of youth and love, and a lamentation for the daunting odds of sustaining either in the tragic circumstances of the Middle East, this novel of inconvenient truths is a triumph of the aesthetic and moral imagination, one that will likely leave its readers (one can only hope that many Israelis and Palestinians will be among them) feeling unsettled and perhaps utterly transformed."

  Sadness Is a White Bird
  Moriel Rothman-Zecher

  Atria Books 2018
  288 Pages $26.00
  ISBN: 978-1501176265
  amazon indiebound
  Review by Ranen Omer-Sherman

  Rarely does one come across a debut novel as artistically accomplished, politically unsettling, and emotionally unflinching as Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s Sadness Is A White Bird. A richly empathic story of Israel and Palestine, history and memory, explored through the intimate bonds between young Jewish and Muslim Israelis, it offers all that one could wish for in a coming-of-age story. By turns humorous, joyful, melancholy, erotic, and tragic, the author’s luminous prose consistently delivers the crucial element of convincing detail.

  Though it begins and ends in a military prison cell, that bleak framing device actually contains an ebullient and unpredictable series of events. When teenage Jonathan moves back to Israel with his family after years of living in the United States, he settles in happily with his Jewish high school friends until a chance encounter with Nimreen and Laith—a twin girl and boy who happen to be Palestinian Israelis—transforms his life irreparably. The three form a utopian bond, hitchhike from one end of the country to the other, share intimate secrets, smoke pot, and gradually fall in love with one another. Jonathan’s sexual fluidity is conveyed matter-of-factly and perhaps that very indeterminacy spurs him to commit other transgressions, including loosening the chains of his grandfather’s sacrosanct ideology.

  As for Nimreen and Laith, readers well-versed in Israeli literature might wonder whether Rothman-Zecher intended to send a salvo across the generations by evoking the mysterious twins who preoccupied the secret desires of Hannah Gonen, the unstable narrator of Amos Oz’s canonical 1968 novel My Michael. (He insists no.) In any case, far more than figments of subconscious desire, these siblings spring to life on the page, as memorably complex as Jonathan himself. This being Israel, the three inevitably argue passionately about politics and identity; their raw and testy exchanges about painful realities and misperceptions of the “other” constitute some of the novel’s most gripping moments. Yet, for a time, their shared intimacy seems indestructible. However, the twins bitterly recoil when Jonathan decides to join the Paratroopers, a decision partly inspired by his family’s own wounded history in Salonica, partly by his desire to prove himself in a country that places a supreme value on military service. He pretends that nothing will change but of course everything does: “My soldier dream was the fourth member of our group, following the three of us wherever we went.” While a vital source of the novel’s verisimilitude is its intense exploration of the tender solidarity (and poignant illusions) of young soldiers training for combat, Sadness Is A White Bird adamantly overturns the popular image of the Israeli Defense Forces as the world’s most moral, humane army. Rothman-Zecher has little patience for the corrosive culture of hypocrisy steadily nurtured by the military occupation. But if this novel doesn’t shy from taking a principled opposition to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, there is never a moment that strays into sanctimony, nor do polemics overshadow its sheer artistry as storytelling.

  Without imposing a false symmetry, Sadness memorably juxtaposes two family tragedies; one concerns the killing of the brother of Jonathan’s grandfather in Nazi-occupied Greece, the other the cold-blooded murder of Nimreen and Laith's grandfather by soldiers in 1956. Inevitably, these distant horrors intrude on the present. After a brief sojourn in Salonica, Jonathan emerges grimly determined to overcome his earlier ambivalences. If once he entertained a naïve fantasy of raising mixed Jewish-Arab children with Nimreen, he now aspires only “to move straight ahead, from my people’s past into my people’s future, my family’s future. I was done zigzagging into the pasts and presents of other peoples, other families.” The damage Jonathan’s sudden turn inflicts on both those he loves and on his own increasingly fragile psyche is devastating. Yet ultimately someone else pays a far heavier price.

  Rothman-Zecher is an accomplished poet and his lyricism often shines, as when he portrays the hormonal rush of the young narrator anticipating seeing his friends: “I could almost hear the watery murmur of the bong, almost feel the static crackle of potential collisions, between tongues and palms and slender bodies.” The author's intense admiration for other poetic witnesses to the Middle East’s harsh realities (including Yehuda Amichai), and a haunting homage to the verse of Palestine’s “unofficial national poet" Mahmoud Darwish is delicately interwoven throughout, beginning with the novel’s very title. And that deep attunement to language’s inherent poetry is also evident in his insistent intermingling of Arabic and Hebrew in both their lyrical and slangy forms; the result is a vibrant collage of cultures and a happily immersive experience for readers.

  Rothman-Zecher is hardly the first writer to recognize that “otherness” is the most seductive spice in all the Middle East, nor is he the first to explore a “Romeo and Juliet” narrative between Jews and Arabs. (Just last year, Dorit Rabinyan's All the Rivers aroused the ire of Israel’s political Right and was banned by the Ministry of Education for portraying intimate relations between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man.) But Sadness Is A White Bird may be the most artful and irresistible exploration of “illicit” love in the Holy Land since A.B. Yehoshua’s beloved 1977 novel The Lover. At once a celebration of youth and love, and a lamentation for the daunting odds of sustaining either in the tragic circumstances of the Middle East, this novel of inconvenient truths is a triumph of the aesthetic and moral imagination, one that will likely leave its readers (one can only hope that many Israelis and Palestinians will be among them) feeling unsettled and perhaps utterly transformed.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22220-moriel-rothman-zecher-sadness-white-bird#.WqPpdx1uZpg
  Word count: 406

  QUOTED: "informed by author Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s background in Arabic literature and social activism, both of which add passion and integrity to the story."

  February 2018

  SADNESS IS A WHITE BIRD
  A trio torn apart by war
  BookPage review by Lauren Bufferd

  American readers may not be familiar with the conflicting loyalties some Israeli combatants feel regarding their government’s policies; sometimes Israelis go so far as to enlist in the army and then refuse to serve.

  But Sadness Is a White Bird, a lyrical debut by a rising literary star, may change that. The novel tells the story of a very young soldier who is driven to his breaking point when his friendship with Palestinian twins interferes with the expectations of country and family.

  The novel begins in a jail cell just days after the narrator’s 19th birthday. Two years ago, Jonathan’s family moved to Israel, where he completed high school and readied himself for mandatory army service. As a committed Zionist, Jonathan’s ideals were shaped by his grandfather’s childhood in war-torn Salonica, Greece, and his later involvement in the early militias that led to Israeli statehood after World War II. But after meeting two Palestinian students at the University of Haifa—Laith and his sister, Nimreen—Jonathan’s hard-won perspective begins to change. His new ideals are tested when his unit is called on to protect a new settlement from protesters.

  Before that day, Laith, Nimreen and Jonathan formed an inseparable trio, hitchhiking cross-country, hanging out in seaside cafes and spending more than one pot-fueled night on the beach. The friendship has an erotic edge; Jonathan finds himself attracted to both of the siblings, as much a physical attraction as a meeting of the minds fueled by the sharing of ideas, memories and poetry. The novel itself is written as a passionate letter to Laith from the imprisoned Jonathan, and is peppered with lyrics and phrases from notable Palestinian poets and filled with the urgency of a young man trying to understand where he stands.

  Informed by author Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s background in Arabic literature and social activism, both of which add passion and integrity to the story, Sadness Is a White Bird is part coming-of-age tale and part unblinking observation of a political situation that continues to defy solutions, treaties or agreements.

• Rhapsody in Books Weblog
  https://rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/review-of-sadness-is-a-white-bird-by-moriel-rothman-zecher/
  Word count: 2147

  QUOTED: "This poignant and sobering story is distressingly bleak, because polarization over the region is so passionately adversarial and deep-seated. Nevertheless, the author manages to lends poetic beauty to moral complexity. The story also, importantly, illuminates the ways in which cultural discourse informs perspectives."

  Review of “Sadness is a White Bird” by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
  Posted on 03/08/2018 by rhapsodyinbooks
  This book tells a tragic and ultimately stunning story, and although it is fiction – it speaks important truths to those who would hear them.

  It is narrated by Jonathan, 19, currently in an Israeli prison. The narration is in the form of a monologue during which Jonathan reminisces about how he ended up in prison. Addressing his musings to his beloved Arab friend Laith, Jonathan frequently invokes snippets of poems by Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, whose award-winning work has inspired the Palestinian people; “Identity Card” has been turned into a song of protest. Darwish, who died in 2008, is considered to be “the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora . . . the voice of the fragmented soul.”

  With Darwish’s poetry, as in other aspects of this story, the author makes us work for the whole. He provides only pieces of the poet’s work; you need to google it to find out the rest. This is also true of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet quoted in the book. (Similarly, the ending is one we must construct ourselves along with the author.)

  On its surface, this is a coming-of-age story about Jonathan, a Jew who grew up in a mostly non-Jewish town in Pennsylvania. He felt weakness and shame over his inability to respond to anti-semitic bullying. He fantasized about going to Israel and becoming a “warrior”:

  “I was sick of being People of the Word. I wanted to be People of the Sword. I wanted tanned arms and campfires, braided folk songs and righteous rifles. I wanted to be like [my grandfather] Saba Yehuda, teeth bared like tiny shields against the stabbing world.”

  Surrounded by other Jews at summer camp, he thinks:

  “If dinky little Camp Samaria was so full of possibility, I could barely imagine what sort of redemption lay in wait in the actual Land of Milk and Honey and Uzis and Bamba [an Israeli snack] and Eucalyptus Groves and Khaki and Tragedy and Redemption.”

  Note: the ideas of both tragedy and redemption form important parts of Jonathan’s psyche.

  Jonathan was born in Israel and thus had dual citizenship; his mother was Israeli, and his grandfather still resided in Israel. When the grandfather became terminally ill and requested his daughter to come back so he could know his grandchildren better before he died, Jonathan got his wish to live in Israel. Enlistment to the Israeli Defense Forces is mandatory for all Israeli citizens who have turned 18, so Jonathan could also fulfill his desire to become a “warrior” when he turned 19.

  In an episode on Feb 17, 2018 remarkably similar to one occurring in this book, Israeli Defense Force soldiers fire tear gas canisters on Palestinians during a protest demonstration

  But before that happened, he unexpectedly made two Arab friends, Laith and Nimreen, the twin children of his mother’s friend. That friendship changed everything Jonathan thought he knew and believed. He looked at the twins and “I felt it, like a drop of pomegranate juice spreading through a glass of bright-white milk, changing everything.”

  As he later reflected, speaking in his mind to Laith:

  “…you and your sister, molten twins, mournful and wild, silly and sacrilegious, sharp and stoned, gentle and beautiful, whose love was burning through my flesh, threatening to scorch and disfigure my past. To engulf my future.”

  Jonathan grew to love and desire both Nimreen and Laith. It was perhaps the case that Jonathan was simply bisexual, but this author’s work is steeped in metaphor and symbolism. I saw Jonathan’s relationship with both the twins as more of a reflection of his ambivalence about the divide between Israel and Palestine. Both male and female, cool versus fiery, appealed to him for different reasons, and he was torn between the two of them.

  Through the twins, and especially Nimreen, Jonathan gains a new perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  For background, it is important to know that the State of Israel was created from a movement at the turn of the 20th century in Eastern Europe by a group of Jewish intellectuals. They were looking for an alternative to living under the threat of increasing anti-Semitism and the violent movements spawned from it. They picked Palestine because of the historical association of Jews with the land. The term “Zionism” was coined in 1885 by the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum, Zion being one of the biblical names for Jerusalem. But unfortunately and inconveniently for the Zionists, the land was already occupied by an indigenous population. Much like European colonizers who came to America, however, the “Natives” were considered expendable.

  The Zionists, in their moralistic fervor, seemed oblivious to the fact that even while they were trying to escape racism and injustice, they were expressing it on their own behalf somewhere else. But just as memory and identity have never been easily erased in Jews, nor were they so easily erased in Arabs. As one of Nimreen’s friends says to Jonathan:

  “I’m not from Israel. I’m from before Israel, from beneath the Israeli towns and cities built over my homes and orchards and fields. I am an Arab Palestinian, not an Israeli.”

  Jonathan, like many American Jews, had a rosy, idealistic view of Israelis that was reinforced by a sense of righteousness because of the horror of the Holocaust. Much of what Nimreen told him about the treatment of Arabs by Israelis was not only new to him, but hard for him to believe.

  For example, Nimreen took Jonathan to meet her grandmother Selsabeel Ziad, who told him the appalling story of what happened to her first husband Marwan in 1956. In October of that year, Israel invaded Egypt in what the West called “The Suez Crisis” or the “Second Arab-Israeli War.” The Jews immediately imposed a curfew, enforcing it before notification of it could even be disseminated. Marwan and other shepherds were out with their flocks and returned to the village late. Unarmed and defenseless, they (and hidden bystanders) stood in shock as the Israelis mowed them down. Selsabeel and other woman and children ran away and survived, “in body at least.”

  After they left the grandmother’s house, Jonathan said to Nimreen, “But is that what really happened?” Nimreen responded, “How dare you.”

  [This account is unfortunately quite true. “The Kafr Qasim massacre” took place in the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Qasim situated on the Green Line, which was at that time the de facto border between Israel and the Jordanian West Bank. The massacre was carried out by the Israel Border Police, who killed Arab civilians returning from work after a curfew imposed earlier in the day of which they were unaware. In total 48 people were shot down, of which 19 were men, 6 were women and 23 were children aged 8–17. Arab sources usually give the death toll as 49, as they include the unborn child of one of the women. In December 2007, President of Israel Shimon Peres formally apologised for the massacre.]

  From the massacre memorial museum in Kafr Qasim

  Nimreen also educated Jonathan about the shootings of October, 2000, when Israeli Police killed 13 Palestinians — 12 of them Israeli citizens — who took to the streets to show solidarity with demonstrators in the West Bank and Gaza. For those killings, there was a complete absence of accountability. Nimreen said to Jonathan:

  “Ever heard of Israeli Police shooting live bullets at Israeli Ultra Orthodox protestors or Israeli Mizrahim or Israeli Israelis period? We got the message, then. Our parents’ generation’s plan – integrate, keep hour heads down, beg for scraps, be Good Arabs – hasn’t gotten us anywhere. And anyway, whatever strategy we use to survive, our identity is Palestinian. That can’t be taken from us, you know?”

  She agreed there are good and bad people on both sides, but “you guys have the checkpoints and the F-16s and M-16s and Q-16s and whatever and . . . and the Most Moral Army in the Universe, which just so happens to be controlling and destroying the lives of fucking millions of people.’”

  As the author stated in an article:

  “We are so similar. We are all swept up in self-righteousness, we are all afraid and violent and capable of wishing expulsion and death on the other side.

  Israel is carrying out a massacre in Gaza.

  If Hamas had the capability to kill or expel hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of Israelis, I am often asked, wouldn’t they do so?

  My answer is: Yes. I am confident that they would.

  In that case, I am asked, why are you focusing primarily on what the Israeli government and military are doing?

  My answer is: While the willingness to kill innocents on the other is similar, the capability to do so is not.”

  Author Moriel Rothman-Zecher

  He explains further:

  “ . . . both sides may want to kill the other, but one side is immensely powerful, and the other side is not. This is not a conflict, and it is not war. If, God forbid, Hamas got a fleet of F-16s, and if, God willing, Gaza were protected by an Iron Dome, then this would be a two-sided war. But that is not the case, and so this is a massacre. . . .”

  Jonathan can’t reconcile all of this in his mind. The Jews are seeking refuge from genocide – how can one not have compassion for them? How can their cause not be just? And yet, what he learns from Nimreen is also inexcusable.

  Nimreen quotes more bitter lines from her favorite poet Dawish, and Jonathan asks her: “Does Darwish have any poems that aren’t so political?”

  “Nimreen took a deep drag, and when she spoke, her voice was wrapped in a cloud: ‘There is nothing ‘not political’ in Palestine, habibi.’”

  Nimreen and Laith both warn Jonathan that if he joins the army, he will not be the same person. But he insists he has no choice.

  The result is a nightmare, and the only question is whether or not Jonathan awaken from it.

  It is well to contemplate this segment Darwesh’s poem “Identity Card”:

  “Write down!
  I am an Arab
  You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
  And the land which I cultivated
  Along with my children
  And you left nothing for us
  Except for these rocks..
  So will the State take them
  As it has been said?!

  Therefore!
  Write down on the top of the first page:
  I do not hate poeple
  Nor do I encroach
  But if I become hungry
  The usurper’s flesh will be my food
  Beware..
  Beware..
  Of my hunger
  And my anger!”

  Poet Mahmoud Darwish

  Discussion: One can only hope this story will at least challenge some erroneous preconceptions Westerners have about the situation in Israel. As the author writes elsewhere and demonstrates so powerfully in this book:

  “We need not look far to recall that the experience of oppression does not make a community moral. . . . Seeking justice means seeking justice for everyone.”

  He continues:

  “This is not a story of Cruel Israelis or Evil Jews versus Good Palestinians or Noble Arabs, and the answer will not come from simply reversing power structures. It is a story of mutual dehumanization and un-mutual power, and the answer has to come from creating power structures in which human beings’ violent, narrow instincts are checked and our capacity for decency is uplifted. And that is something no bomb, no burning, no rifle, no bullet can ever accomplish.”

  Evaluation: This poignant and sobering story is distressingly bleak, because polarization over the region is so passionately adversarial and deep-seated. Nevertheless, the author manages to lends poetic beauty to moral complexity. The story also, importantly, illuminates the ways in which cultural discourse informs perspectives. It would be an outstanding choice for book clubs.

  Rating: 4/5

  Published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2018

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