The Diamond Setter: A Novel - Couverture souple

Sakal, Moshe

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1590518918 ISBN 13 : 9781590518915

Editeur : Other Press, 2018

Synopsis

Inspired by true events, this best-selling Israeli novel traces a complex web of love triangles, homoerotic tensions, and family secrets across generations and borders, illuminating diverse facets of life in the Middle East.

The uneventful life of a jeweler from Tel Aviv changes abruptly in 2011 after Fareed, a handsome young man from Damascus, crosses illegally into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa in search of his roots. In his pocket is a piece of a famous blue diamond known as "Sabakh." Intending to return the diamond to its rightful owner, Fareed is soon swept up in Tel Aviv's vibrant gay scene, and a turbulent protest movement. He falls in love with both an Israeli soldier and his boyfriend--the narrator of this book--and reveals the story of his family's past: a tale of forbidden love beginning in the 1930s that connects Fareed and the jeweler.
 
Following Sabakh's winding path, The Diamond Setter ties present-day events to a forgotten time before the establishment of the State of Israel divided the region. Moshe Sakal's poignant mosaic of characters, locales, and cultures encourages us to see the Middle East beyond its violent conflicts.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Moshe Sakal is the author of five Hebrew novels, including the best-selling novel Yolanda, which was shortlisted for the Sapir Prize (the Israeli Booker) in 2011. Sakal was awarded the title of Honorary Fellow in Writing by the University of Iowa, the Eshkol prize for his work, and a Fulbright grant (the America-Israel Education Trust). He has published essays and opinion pieces in several major Israeli outlets including Ha’aretz as well as in Le Monde (France) and Forward (USA). His novel, Sister, was published in Israel in May 2016 and was longlisted for the Sapir prize. Fluent in three languages, Sakal studied and worked in France between 2000 and 2006. Until recently, he headed the Literary Division of the Israeli Center for Books and Libraries.

Jessica Cohen is a freelance translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Israeli prose, poetry, and other creative work. Her translations include David Grossman’s critically acclaimed A Horse Walks into a Bar (winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), and works by major Israeli writers including Etgar Keret, Rutu Modan, Dorit Rabinyan and Ronit Matalon, as well as Golden Globe-winning director Ari Folman. She is a past board member of the American Literary Translators Association and has served as a judge for the National Translation Award.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

PREFACE TO THE 2026 EDITION

The Diamond Setter revolves around Fareed, a young man from Damascus who longs to know, firsthand, his grandparents’ homeland of Palestine. He crosses the border from Syria into Israel and, with a few steps that seem to erase that border as if it had never existed, reaches Jaffa. Fareed’s personal journey unearths geographical, political, and human layers of a space that, until 1948, was shared by Palestinians and Jews from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and other Arab cities, who spoke Arabic and were part of the same cultural and linguistic landscape. This space is not an imagined project of “coexistence,” but simply a shared life characterized by both intimacy and difference—a life encompassing travel, work, passions, and a profound affinity with land and people.
I come from a Jewish family of Damascene jewelers — part of that Arab world that all but ceased to exist in 1948. The stories I was told, which are wholly incongruent with our current reality, live inside me. Increasingly, I understand that they must serve as testimony. This book seeks to turn our gaze back to that shared Arab space and to salvage what is left of it: movement between generations, reminiscences, and a human reality that endures in memories, languages, and place.
The previous English-language edition of this novel, which was published in 2018, while I was still living in Israel, created a broad mosaic of characters who populated the stories of two families — the Palestinian traveler Fareed’s and the Jewish jeweler Menashe’s — as well as the fabled diamond that connects their histories. These are the stories I feel an urgent need to rescue, because they are, at times, all that is left. The book you hold now was my opportunity to revisit the characters and their tales through a contemporary lens, in which the wrenching events now unfolding in Palestine and Israel are refracted. Like gemstones passed from hand to hand, changing the fate of whoever holds them, they bear witness to a vanished world — and open the imagination to envision a future one.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Other Press
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1590518918
• ISBN 13: 9781590518915
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 304
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne