Second person singular
Second person singular ( Hebrew גוף שני יחיד) is the third novel by the Arab-Israeli writer and journalist Sayed Kashua , published in Hebrew in 2010 . The book was translated into German by Mirjam Pressler .
action
Second Person Singular tells the stories of two Arab-Israeli men, a successful criminal defense attorney and a social worker, from two perspectives , who both come from small Palestinian villages and whose lives in Israel the author intertwines in an unusual way.
The lawyer runs a successful law firm in West Jerusalem . His colleague Tariq is also a lawyer and Samaah is his secretary. Although Samaah studied law, her degree from the University of Jordan is not recognized in Israel. She is also the daughter of a senior Fatah member .
The unnamed lawyer, of whom Kashua tells in the third person singular, tries very hard to maintain his image as a wealthy and educated Israeli Arab. For this reason, among other things, he buys a novel every Thursday, which he becomes aware of through a literary supplement to a daily newspaper. His wife is studying psychology. One day he found a love letter in the handwriting of his wife Laila in an antiquarian copy of Tolstoy's Die Kreutzer Sonata . He becomes jealous, believes his wife is cheating on him, and goes in search of previous owner Jonathan, whose name is on the first page of the book.
The second storyline starts a few years earlier. The 28-year-old, shy, lonely Amir tells from a first-person perspective . He works as a social worker in a drug counseling center, also in West Jerusalem. He gets to know a new intern named Laila better, who leaves him a loving message on a piece of paper. Amir loses contact with Laila and forgets the slip of paper in the book Die Kreutzersonata , which he reads while caring for a severely disabled young Jew named Jonathan who has an extensive library.
Jonathan is in a permanent vegetative state after attempting suicide . Amir and Jonathan are of the same age and look very similar, which is why Amir succeeds in taking over Jonathan's identity after his death . Jonathan is buried under Amir's name, and with his Jewish identity Amir gets the desired place in the renowned Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design .
Eventually the investigation leads the lawyer to Jonathan / Amir. It now becomes clear that the lawyer mistakenly identified the old piece of paper in his wife's book as an actual love letter.
criticism
“Sayed Kashua mixes elements of crime fiction and development novel. He poignantly describes the ambivalent existence of educated Israeli Palestinians, their contradicting desires, their dilemma as a double minority. You are at home neither in the majority Israeli society nor in the Palestinian community. [...] In short dialogues and internal monologues, he makes their turmoil and loneliness clear. Sometimes they are angry, then again melancholy, but they always see each other through the eyes of the others. They do not have a dialogue partner with whom they could communicate in the second person singular. "
“The subtext of both stories deals with nothing less than the relationship between art and life. Amir, who reinvents himself as an artist, does so at the cost of losing his true identity. The lawyer, who would so much like to be a literary connoisseur, lives by reading the "Kreutzer Sonata" without reflecting on its content, driven by a blind jealousy, the origin of which he cannot explain to himself. "
“Despite all the lightness of the tone, all the merriment, it becomes clear how serious Kashua is, how compulsive his heroes are in search of identity, how much bitterness there is in them. And how little they correspond to the Arab cliché circulating in Israeli society. "
expenditure
- גוף שני יחיד (transcribed: Guf sheni yaḥid), Keter Publishing House , Jerusalem 2010, ISBN 978-965-07-1838-1 .
- Second person singular . From the Hebrew by Mirjam Pressler. Berlin Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8270-1013-1 .
- Second person singular . Translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg. Grove Press, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-8021-2019-9 .
Prices
In 2010 the book was shortlisted for the Israeli Sapir Literature Prize. In 2011 Sayed Kashua received the Israeli Bernstein Literature Prize, endowed with 50,000 shekels, for the best original Hebrew novel for Second Person Singular based on Amos Oz , David Grossmann and Meir Shalev . The jury emphasized the satirical view of Israelism, especially Israeli-Arab thinking, as it has seldom been reflected in Hebrew literature.
filming
My Heart Dances is an Israeli-French-German film drama directed by Eran Riklis from 2014, for which Kashua wrote the script. The original template is his autobiographical novel Tanzende Araber , but he deviated from it by using people and actions from the second person singular .
Individual evidence
- ^ Carsten Hueck: Juggling with identities. In: Zürcher Zeitung, October 26, 2011
- ^ In: Taz, January 10, 2012
- ↑ Gerrit Bartels: Born an Arab and citizen of Israel. In: Der Tagesspiegel, April 10, 2011
- ↑ "The jury cited Kashua's novel for its 'fascinating and satirical look at Israeliness and especially the Arab-Israeli mind, a topic that has barely been reflected in Hebrew literature.'" Maya Sela: Haaretz's Sayed Kashua and Omri Herzog Win Literary Prize , Haaretz, July 20, 2011