John Freeman

An Israeli Arab learns the bitter wisdom of Thomas Wolfe's old adage--you can't go home again--in Sayed Kashua's nervy second novel, "Let it Be Morning." As the tale begins, our unnamed narrator leaves his job at a Tel Aviv newspaper and returns to his ancestral village, only to discover a broken society.

In the ten years since the narrator last visited, veils have become popular, readings of the Koran have proliferated on TV and religious weddings have eclipsed the bacchanalian ones. Cut off from their Jewish neighbors, the Arabs in his home village nurse grudges and respond to the heavy hand of Israeli checkpoint operators with increasing resignation.

Shortly after the novel begins, Israeli tanks arrive without explanation and surround the town. As the siege stretches from hours into days, villagers trade stories, each one worse than the one before it. Soon enough, actual atrocities--contractors attempting to leave for work in a pickup are shot and killed--give way to paranoid conspiracies. The United States and Israel are about to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, say the young men. Iraq is using its weapons of mass destruction, say others.

"Let it Be Morning" shows how this situation is manipulated and spun from both sides. Moreover, it shows how a population reacts when it's slowly strangled. First they have questions: When will the barricade lift? What is it for? Then they get angry. Ultimately, they adapt. It's what they have always done. But as this novel makes clear, it cannot always be so.

"Let it Be Morning"

By Sayed Kashua, translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger

Black Cat, 271 pages, $13

(2006-07-18)

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