KASHUA, Sayed << back to list Sayed Kashua is a journalist and a TV writer as well as the author of three novels: DANCING ARABS (2002), LET IT BE MORNING (2004) AND SECOND PERSON (2010). He publishes a weekly column in Ha’aretz newspaper and is the creator and script writer of the critically acclaimed satiric television sitcom Arab Labor. Kashua is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2004 Grinzane Cavour Award for First Novel 2004 (Italy), The 2005 Prime Minister’s Prize (Israel), the 2006 Lessing Prize for Critic (Germany), the 2011 Bernstein Prize (Israel) and the 2012 Prix des Lecteurs du Var (France). (photo © Yanai Yehiel) Bibliography & Foreign sales SECOND PERSON (Fiction) 2010 The novel’s protagonist is an ambitious lawyer who is considered to be the best Arab criminal attorney in Jerusalem. He has a thriving practice in the Western Jerusalem, the Jewish part of the city, a big house, speaks perfect Hebrew, frequents neighborhood cafés, and enjoys an altogether satisfying lifestyle. He is in love with his wife, Leila and his two children. In his favorite bookstore one day he picks up a used copy of The Kreutzer Sonata, a book that his wife, Leila, has casually mentioned. Inside, he finds a note, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwriting: “I waited for you and you didn’t arrive. I hope everything is all right with you. I wanted to thank you for last night, it was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?” The lawyer becomes consumed with suspicion and jealousy. Humiliated and obsessed, he follows his wife around Jerusalem attempting to decipher the mystery. Kashua deftly spins a tale of love and betrayal, faith and disloyalty, honesty and artifice. For this novel the author has won the 2011 Bernstein Prize and the 2012 Prix des Lecteurs du Var. Rights sold to: France, Editions de L’Olivier; Germany, Berlin Verlag; Holland, Ambo/Anthos; USA, Grove/Atlantic; Taiwan (Complex Chinese rights), Crown; Slovakia, Slovart; UK, Chatto & Windus; Italy, Neri Pozza; China, Horizon; Spain, Galaxia Gutenberg; Turkey, Picus Yaymcilik; Israel, Keter Reviews ”The appearance of Second Person Singular is a joyful event…[a] fascinating and daring novel. Kashua…offers an intriguing outlook on Israeli society and on the hybrid identity of its Arab citizens.” – Professor Michael Gluzman, Chair, Dep. Of Literature, Tel Aviv University ”SECOND PERSON SINGULAR may be the most ambitious of Sayed Kashua’s three novels, as well as the best. ”The literary achievements of Kashua’s third novel - on the narrative level and, more significantly, on the structural level - place SECOND PERSON SINGULAR on a totally different plane than his previous works. With this book, Sayed Kashua has become one of the most important contemporary Hebrew writers.” – Ayman Sikseck, Ha’aretz “Part comedy of manners, part psychological mystery . . . Issues of nationalism, religion, and passing collide with quickly changing social and sexual mores.” – Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe ”…A good chronicler of his generation and his country…Kashua’s work captures the unique and often painful situation of Israel’s Arab citizens, while also opening a window for the non-Arab reader to better understand this dilemma. ”The novel takes us inside the lives of the Palestinian professionals who live mostly in East Jerusalem or in villages within the expanded greater Jerusalem borders…and are a complex mix of Israeli citizens, West Bankers, and Jerusalemites, who don’t have citizenship status among either the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority.” – Jo-Ann Mort, Tablet ”’Second Person Singular’ triumphs as a tragicomedy composed of two suspensefully intertwined stories tracing the lives of two unnamed Arab protagonists, illuminating their fraught condition as insiders and outsiders and their painful struggle to create a life of meaning. ”In Mitch Ginsburg’s lively translation from the Hebrew, Kashua’s razor-sharp wit and irony are on full display... Kashua proves an incisive guide to the simmering tensions of class, politics and generation within Arab-Israeli society, and between Arabs and the hostile majority... Much more than in previous works, Kashua examines life as a struggle against the destructive forces within the individual, even while bearing unsparing witness to the corrosive ethnic pressures and xenophobia of Israeli society. And the disquieting denouement in which these troubled men’s lives finally intersect is storytelling of the highest order.” – Ranen Omer- Sherman, The Jewish Daily Forward ”Second Person Singular, Sayed Kashua’s new book, proves once and for all that he is the best Hebrew writer working today.” – Walla! ”Much of what this novel leaves me thinking about is how identity, borders and names can shape and influence opportunity and destiny, a universal dilemma for many or if we are fortunate, chances that we don’t even realize are so much more of an advantage than what some must confront by virtue of birth…..An interesting story and an exceptional insight into a world few really knoe we understand.” – Claire, Word by Word ”This is one of those books that with each chapter you realize that the book is even better than what you thought is was in the last chapter in which you thought is was already very good.” – E-mago LET IT BE MORNING (Fiction) 2004 After a series of disappointments in the Jewish city where he lives, the hero, an Arab journalist, returns to the village of his birth in order to rebuild his life with his wife and daughter. To his amazement he discovers that Arab society has completely changed and that he finds himself unable to avoid confrontations with its new order and customs. One morning the Israeli Army enforces a total curfew for no apparent reason and the hero and his family have to decide what it means to be human beings in an obviously inhuman situation. In LET IT BE MORNING, Sayed Kashua looks on Arab society within the Green Line with a very realistic and impartial eye, examining its identity, ideas and the radical changes that had occurred in its relations to the state of Israel. LET IT BE MORNING is not a political book but a novel about people who live in an impossible era with all the sorrow, joy of life, laughter and pain, cruelty and compassion that these times bring with them. Sayed Kashua tells their story in an amusing and heartwarming manner. Rights sold to: USA, Grove/Atlantic; UK, Atlantic Books; Holland, Vassallucci; France, Editions Olivier; Italy, Guanda; Germany, Berlin Verlag; Lebanon, Saqi; Israel, Keter Reviews ”Let It Be Morning offers a riveting study of human values collapsing under inhuman conditions…” Guardian ”Kashua’s story is justifiably overwrought and claustrophobic…Kashua, himself an Arab journalist working in Israel, explores the unenviable status of Arab Israelis.” Financial Times ”…a provocative and memorable novel… Mr. Kashua’s pacy narrative keeps the story moving to a clever and blackly humorous climax.” Economist ”Let It Be Morning is not only a revealing exploration of the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel, but also a thumping good yarn…Kashua juxtaposes the story of a loving father who wants to save his family against a background of increasingly absurdist politics, with a final ironic denouement which turns everything upside down.” The Big Issue – London ”Sayed Kashua belongs to the new generation of writers who refuse to be a mouthpiece for any ideology.” Pages des libraires ”Sayed Kashua illustrates impressively the dilemma between loyalty, disappointment and fear of Israeli Palestinians. He depicts artfully simple how history prevents human beings to develop an autonomous personality.” Neue Zuericher Zeitung ”A tense and uneasy novel that pulls the reader along to a foreign land.” Frankfurter Rundschau “One of the most potent and impressive novels that have been written in Hebrew in the last several years.” Ha’aretz “If you read just two books a year, LET IT BE MORNING should be one of them.” Israel Radio DANCING ARABS (Fiction) 2002 Sayed Kashua gives Israeli literature one of its most moving moments: a hero who is totally Palestinian and equally Israeli; entirely Hebrew and entirely Arab; raised in an Arab village and growing up in a Jewish boarding school in Jerusalem, a city both liberated and occupied. Along the way, the hero meanders between two strong women, one called “grandma”, the other “my wife”. Each one teaches him a chapter in love, loyalty, and honesty. They are the anchor that allows him to run from himself, to follow his passions, and most important, to practice his most unusual talent - “to disappear” - the talent that allows him to unveil and to map out the cracks in his soul, and the wild void in the heart of Israeli society. This is Sayed Kashua’s first novel. Recipient of the Grinzane Cavour Award 2004 for First Novel (Italy). Rights sold to: USA, Grove Atlantic, Inc; Holland, Vassallucci; France, Belfond; Germany, Berlin Verlag; Italy, Guanda (reverted); Spain, Ediciones Tropismos; Poland, Fundacja Pogranicze; Indonesia, Serambi; Vietnam, Domino Publishers; Turkey, Picus Yaymcilik; Israel, Modan Publishers Dramatic Rights: Forma International, Italy Reviews ”Gritty and agile...On any given day, Kashua’s narrator may daydream of becoming the first Arab prime minister, bringing ’peace and love to the region,’ or embracing militant Islam and blowing up Israeli soldiers at a local intersection--only to do neither. As a portrait of a young man’s drift into emotional no man’s land, this novel has the feel of grim truth.”--The New York Times Book Review “I think it is an amazing work of fiction. It has integrity and beauty. It rises above the polemics of that searing conflict and renders the life of that land with a touch of humanity.” Fouad Ajami ”Kashua goes beyond the front-page headlines and horrific newspaper photos of Middle East violence to show a different view of what being an Arab is all about.”--The San Francisco Chronicle ”Sayed Kashua’s affecting...debut novel...evokes the conditions, political and personal, that forge his narrator’s disaffected identity...Kashua can be equally unsparing when it comes to the anti-semitism that pervades the Muslim community and the inequities that plague Arab Israeli culture...[and] succeeds admirably in creating a protagonist adrift between two worlds, neither of which, tragically, can sustain him.”--The Miami Herald ”An impressive debut novel...[that] stares unflinchingly at the many ugly realities on both sides of an eternal national crisis, and the result is a bracingly candid lamentation.”--The Baltimore Sun “Sayed Kashua’s frankness and his detailed descriptions give the book the dimensions of a striking satire.” Die Welt “Kashua elevates his dancing Arabs into symbols of his won existence: a life between, where everybody dances with himself.” Die Tageszeitung “…captivating … Sayed Kashua delivers a testimony of an Israeli society plagued by prejudice…” Le Monde des Livres “…a shocking book … a novel without complacency or wordiness narrate the hell of anguished cohabitation and prejudice that foment fears.” La Liberte