Ariela Freedman’s Arabic for Beginners (Linda Leith Publishing) sets the intimate within the international: a friendship between women in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the friendship between an Israeli mother, Hannah, and a Palestinian one deepens, her other relationships – to her husband and country – begin to stumble. Learn more about the debut novel Heather O’Neill calls “a quiet and exquisite portrait” that “brilliantly captures” political and personal turmoil.
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What:Arabic for Beginners (Linda Leith Publishing, 2017)Who:Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2014 Mentorship Program. She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia’s Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her husband and children. Arabic for Beginners is her first novel.Why you need to read this now:Through the story of a friendship between a Jewish and Palestinian woman, Arabic for Beginners explores the seldom-heard voices of women against the backdrop of an intractable and fascinating conflict. As Richard King said on the CBC, this book captures the greys in a region too often imagined in black and white.Hannah sends one of her sons to a “peace pre-school” in Jerusalem, where she meets a young Palestinian-American mother named Jenna, and they develop an ambivalent and complicated friendship. As Hannah explores the country with Jenna and with her family, memories of her early visits return, including a traumatic encounter with Palestinian villagers outside an Israeli settlement, an abruptly ended friendship, and the Gulf War, which she fled as a teenager. Abigail Deutsch, winter of the Shattuck prize for criticism, writes “Delicately observed and strikingly funny, Arabic for Beginners captures the everyday mystery behind adult friendship. Freedman’s subtle, graceful prose spans the large and small, the wondrous and quotidian.” Readers will identify with this raw, honest, and intense account of the love and desperation of early motherhood, and the quest for home.Exploring the political through the personal and the public through the private, Freedman creates a moving and convincing portrait of a woman—and a region—caught in the contradictions of competing loves and loyalties.X plus Y:Freedman’s subtle and smart exploration of women’s experiences and friendships is, as Heather O’Neill writes, “reminiscent of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy.”
What other people are saying:“Ariela Freedman brings to life the kaleidoscopic contradictions and painful paradoxes of life in contemporary Israel/ Palestine. Arabic for Beginners is a story about complicated friendships, marriages on the brink, and ambivalence writ large. This is a brave, intelligent, and impressive literary debut.” Elaine Kalman Naves, author of The Book of Faith.* * *Many thanks to Linda at Linda Leith for sharing this powerful debut with us. For more first-time fiction writers, click here.
