Daniella Carmi
Autor(a) de Samir And Yonatan
About the Author
Image credit: Daniella Carmi
Obras de Daniella Carmi
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1956-10-12
- Sexo
- female
- Nacionalidade
- Israel
- Local de nascimento
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Locais de residência
- Jerusalem, Israel
- Educação
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Ocupação
- Schriftstellerin
Membros
Resenhas
Listas
Prêmios
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Estatísticas
- Obras
- 6
- Membros
- 440
- Popularidade
- #55,641
- Avaliação
- 3.7
- Resenhas
- 11
- ISBNs
- 20
- Idiomas
- 6
Samir is given pain medication and, some nights, a sedative when he wakes up yelling. Suffering intermittent fever as he waits for his operation, he is confined to bed rest in a hospital room with several other children. There’s traumatized Razia, an Arab girl, whose drunken father struck her on the forehead. Golden-haired Ludmilla is a newly arrived Russian Jewish immigrant, who is having difficulty adapting to life in Israel. She either can’t or won’t eat, and she must receive nutrients intravenously. Hyperactive, taunting Tzahi cannot sit still, even though he’s encumbered with a catheter and urine bag, while the doctors try to figure out why he can’t pee normally. Tzahi knows that he scares Samir; he exults in the power he has over his timid roommate who understands Hebrew but seldom speaks. Samir’s fear intensifies when Tzahi’s brother, a soldier, comes to visit one afternoon. Though helmet-less, he wears his uniform and carries a rifle. Samir has spent most of his young life running from members of the IDF, but now his injury forces him to remain in a room with the enemy. The boy subsequently conflates this young soldier with the one who killed Fadi.
Finally, there is Yonatan. It’s unclear what’s wrong with him. His hand is immobilized in some sort of contraption, but the description of his thin fuzzy hair made me think he is possibly being treated for cancer. Samir develops a special relationship with this Orthodox Jewish boy, who is mostly silent and whose nose is in astronomy books all day. Yonatan comes alive at night when the stars can be viewed from the large hospital window. One night he says with a kind of a seriousness that amazes his new friend: “Your trouble, Samir, is that you’re always living in this world . . . There is another world . . . and you can divide your life between this world and that other one. Nobody ever said you have to pass your whole life only in this world, with everybody else. For example, if you run a fever you can simply slip away to the other world and live a good healthy life there.”
In the course of the novel, Carmi skillfully weaves details of Samir’s home life in the Occupied Territories. These details are mostly presented as flashbacks, memories, as Samir lies in his hospital bed. Sometimes, in a manner so characteristic of PTSD sufferers, the memories are triggered by the sights and sounds of the hospital. Samir recalls the night his brother’s body was brought home in a bloodied blanket. He thinks of his elder brother Bassam’s account of his time in jail, the Israeli jeeps moving down narrow Palestinian streets, the curfews, the power outages, the explosions, the death of a pet rabbit by tear gas, the blindness of his grandfather, and the defeated silence of his father. No one from home can even visit the boy in hospital because the roads are blocked, the territories are closed off, and no Arabs are being allowed through.
Carmi’s novel is rich, nuanced, dreamlike in sections, and . . . literary. Even though the characters, apart from the medical staff, are children, this book, in which a hospital room becomes a crucible for psychological change, is best suited to more sophisticated adolescent readers. It’s one of those books that merits a second reading. I certainly understand why it received the American Library Association’s Batcheldor Award, which “recognizes the publisher of the year's "most outstanding" children's book translated into English and published in the U.S.” As I reflect on the novel, it only grows on me more and more . . .
.… (mais)