Dancing Arabs

By: Sayed Kashua, Miriam Shlesinger - translator

Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi

The debut novel by 28-year-old Arab-Israeli Sayed Kashua has been praised around the world for its honesty, irony, humor, and uniquely human portrayal of a young man who moves between two societies, becoming a stranger to both. Kashua's nameless antihero has big shoes to fill, having grown up with the myth of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948 and with a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When he is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs brilliantly maps one man's struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both.

©2002 Sayed Kashua. Translation copyright 2004 by Miriam Shlesinger. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Incredible book, wonderfully performed

Incredible book, wonderfully performed - I read this for a college class and found it enlightening and entertaining. I wish all my assigned readings were so well written and performed!

Very Disappointing Narration

The narrator passes himself as a native speaker, with his heavy Arabic accent, but critical words and names are horribly mispronounced. As a native Arabic speaker, it's very jarring and hear the standard words mispronounced (like Watan, Izzeddine, Ayyar, the last name of Mahmoud Darwiche, and many more). A less pretentious narration would have gone a long way. It's unfortunate, because it takes away from an otherwise very engaging story of a man's struggle with identity and oppression.

I have listened to all the Kashua novels

For all the suffering that Kashua portrays of the Arabs, especially the Palestinians, who are Israeli citizens, he is not an Arab nationalist. In light of his fiction it seems to me that Kashua is not proud of the group into which he was born. The Arab males in his stories are shlmiels, except for the one in Third Person Singular who assumes the identity of a Jew. In Dancing Arabs the anti- hero attends, like Kashua in his youth, a Jewish school because he performance academically is superior to others in his Arab-Israeli village. Yet the bright hero becomes an anti-hero, an alcoholic, a chain-smoker and an adulterer who barely provides for his Arab wife and baby. In the Kashua novels Arabs in the villages of Israel fight between themselves over the little bit of land that the Jews did not take. The villages are horribly violent because of Arab upon Arab crime. Kashua cannot countenance a two-state solution where his “ heroes” would find themselves in an independent Palestine, poor and not democratic. For Kashua’s young Arab men the sole solution of their plight is to leave the region.