cover image Hayati, My Life

Hayati, My Life

Miriam Cooke. Syracuse University Press, $22.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-8156-0671-0

Cooke (Women and the War Story) details the lives of three Palestinian women in this delicately crafted novel, juxtaposing their personal struggles with their experience of the volatile world around them. Various first-person accounts of events from 1947 to 1990 begin in 1960, with 12-year-old Maryam, whose history homework requires her to interview her parents about the war, questioning her mother, Assia. ""Which war?"" is Assia's annoyed response. In 1948, Samya, the family matriarch and survivor of the British Mandate, welcomes her daughter, Assia, with her husband, Basil, home to Jerusalem, following the massacre of Deir Assin. The couple were supporters of the Palestinian Resistance, and their infant son, Usama, was shot in Basil's arms while the two fled the fierce fighting. In Jerusalem, Assia struggles to make ends meet by starting a day-care center while raising her two daughters, Maryam and the mute Afaf, with the help of her mother and troubled, often-unemployed husband. Maryam and Afaf struggle to comprehend their parents' complicated relationship, while coping with their own sibling rivalries. The short, multivoiced chapters inhibit narrative flow, and an abrupt ending mars the tale, but Cooke compels with complex character relationships. At times an unabashed commentary on what the author sees as Israeli tyranny, this novel will be better understood by those who have more than a passing knowledge of the Jewish/Muslim struggle and pertinent dates in its history. (Nov.)