The Diamond Setter: A Novel - Couverture souple

Sakal, Moshe

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1635425964 ISBN 13 : 9781635425963

Editeur : Other Press, 2026

Synopsis

In this revised edition of a novel of exile, inheritance, and return, the fates of two families—one Palestinian, one Jewish—intertwine across generations and borders.

In 2011, Fareed Jabbali, a young Palestinian from Damascus, crosses the border into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa, in search of his grandparents’ lost homeland. He carries in his pocket a rare blue diamond—once a gift to a celebrated chanteuse who sang for the Ottoman sultan—and intends to return it to its rightful owners. More than a relic, the stone is an unsettled debt between two families, waiting to be claimed.

In Tel Aviv, Menashe Salomon, a Jewish jeweler born in 1949 to a family of Damascene jewelers, runs a modest shop, unaware that a long-lost piece of his family’s past is about to resurface. His mother, Adela, once lived in Damascus, where she fell in love with a Palestinian woman, Laila Jabbali—Fareed’s grandmother. As Menashe and Fareed’s paths converge, they confront a question that lingers over the novel: Can what was lost ever truly be restored?

A mosaic of characters and cities—Damascus, Jaffa, Beirut, Tel Aviv—The Diamond Setter bears witness to the Arab-Jewish world destroyed in 1948 and to the long shadow of the Nakba. Now revised with a new preface, this edition recenters the novel on the Palestinian journey of return and on the vanished Levantine world the twentieth century erased.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Moshe Sakal was born in Tel Aviv in 1976 into a Jewish-Arab family of Damascene and Cairene descent. He has lived in Paris and, since 2019, in Berlin, where he became a German citizen. He is the author of six Hebrew novels, including the best-selling Yolanda, and a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His essays have also appeared in Le Monde, Libération, and Haaretz. He is the cofounder of Altneuland Press, the first secular Hebrew literary publisher established outside Israel since 1948. A two-time Sapir Prize nominee and recipient of the Levi Eshkol Prize, a Fulbright Scholar, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Sakal was also awarded the Berlin Senate Grant for Non-German Literature in 2021.

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: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1635425964
• ISBN 13: 9781635425963
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 240
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible