all the rivers

56

A while back, I read “All the rivers” by Dorit Rabinyan. It is a novel, the bittersweet love story of an Israeli translator and a Palestinian artist who meet in New York and fall head over heels for each other. Despite the thick walls put up between them by the history and present of their respective families, nations and religions. The story is so convincingly told, from the perspective of the Israeli woman, that I, too, fall for the sensitive, curious Palestinian man.

Their story may be a maze of navigating between moments of tension caused not by themselves, but by family and history – but they also meet in profound moments of a shared sickness for the landscape of home. In a long, cold, snowy New York winter, they share memories of the hills by the eastern Mediterranean. The dry smell of soil and herbs, the warm breeze from the sea, the light of the unforgiving midday sun, its rosy caress when it sets. So many of their experiences in that landscape diverge, memories of access and being shut out, of violence and alienation. But also: The connection felt in sharing these intimate, sensory expressions of a place, in smell, touch, taste, sound, sight, how rooted these sensations are in both of their bodies.

It is a lovely, and fascinating, and difficult book to read. It has stayed with me, long after I put it down, with a lingering ache in my chest.

Photo: Sun through the needles in Jardí Botànic de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, October 2018. Posted on Instagram September 28, 2020.