Paradiso 17

Assadi (The Stars Are Not Yet Bells) spins a beautiful and heartbreaking novel out of a Palestinian man’s deathbed reflections. Sufien is five in the spring of 1948 during the Nakba, when he and his family are forced from their home in Safad. His lifelong odyssey as a refugee begins in a camp in Damascus, then proceeds in Kuwait, where he grows up, and university in Florence, Italy. After his father runs out of money for tuition, Sufien is forced to abandon his studies. He meets Bernardo, a rich Jewish American, who will become a lifelong friend and cajole him into moving to New York City. There, he lives in a cramped Harlem room and works in a bodega. In moments of need, he calls on Bernardo for help, as when he loses the job and becomes destitute. He meets and marries a Jewish woman, Sarah, from a moderately wealthy family, and Bernardo buys him a taxi medallion, but after he goes bankrupt, they wind up in Arizona. They raise a daughter, Layla, and he dreams of finishing his education and writing a memoir. Assadi writes with astonishing fluidity, using Sufien’s story to illustrate the legacy of displacement without losing sight of the character’s humanity, as Sufien, now dying from cancer in his 70s, considers how his “homeland had been stolen, was being stolen, cast to the dustbin of history.” Most wrenching is his ambivalence over Layla’s acceptance to Columbia University and eventaul departure from home (“He was devastated. And he was proud. It was a terrible feeling”). This is remarkable. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)