As I write, I’m deep into The Way to the Spring, a new book about life in the West Bank by the American novelist and journalist Ben Ehrenreich. I’m gripped by it, which is a surprise, good nonfiction about Israel-Palestine (where I once lived) being relatively hard to find. Some books are too polemical; others are well reported, but written in prose so uninviting, you soon return them to the shelf; many come with the strong whiff either of an adolescent kind of love or, even more dubiously, of danger porn.
But this one is different. Most (though not all) of the facts are here; if you want bleak statistics, you won’t be disappointed. But Ehrenreich lived with many of those he writes about, and so his story is wonderfully intimate. A mother reading Dan Brown in Arabic. A settler tangled in razor wire. The black socks on a dead man’s feet. For all its politics – and its author is extremely attentive to the way things work (and don’t work) in Palestine – I feel more like I’m involved in a pacy novel than struggling to swallow yet more unpalatable truths.
Ehrenreich is good on Rawabi, Palestine’s new planned city, and on what he calls Planet Hebron, where beatings are as normal as breakfast. But he comes most alive in Nabi Saleh, a village north of Ramallah, whose out-of-bounds spring – the spring of the book’s title – is the focus of its inhabitants’ dogged protests.
The Way to the Spring joins, then, the small number of Palestine-related books I’m likely to press on friends. On this list already are: I Saw Ramallah (trans: Ahdaf Soueif), in which the poet Mourid Barghouti describes his return to the West Bank 30 years after he left it in 1966; Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar, an astonishing Israeli novel published only months after the 1948 war, in which a soldier wrestles with his conscience as the inhabitants of an Arab village are expelled from their homes; Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, a comic look at life in the occupied West Bank by the Palestinian architect Suad Amiry; and The City of Abraham: History, Myth and Memory, a Journey Through Hebron by Edward Platt, which does what it says on the tin with dexterity and solicitude.
