Forbidden Love, Described with Delicacy
Review of All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan
She knew. Liat knew she had to run away as fast as she could, but she did not.
From the beginning, she told us, “the hands of loss keep touching the memory.” But she ever so delicately recalls their forbidden love affair.
She is in NYC doing research for her master’s degree. When her friend Andrew cannot meet her as planned, he sends Hilmi, his Arabic teacher, to let her know.
She is Jewish from Tel Aviv, and he is from Ramallah. He has “an overgrown mane of hair” and beautiful hands.
He invites himself to join her there at the coffee shop. The afternoon slips away, and he invites her to his studio to see his art.
They have only two seasons together, winter and spring. The city gives Liat a freeing anonymity that she relishes. As they become closer, she meets his friends and his siblings.
There is a troubling scene when his older brother is visiting and a group of them are having dinner out. While Liat and Hilmi have mostly avoided talking about the troubled division of Palestine back home, his brother confronts her with his views.
As an outsider, reading that section and the following one about Liat and Hilmi’s reactions, I thought these exchanges succinctly summarized the complicated situation in Israel and the West Bank.
The couple puts the testy interchanges behind them and continues their relationship. The 20th of May arrives, and she goes home to Tel Aviv.
I am not going to be a spoiler and give you any clues about how the story ends.
Rabinyan has authored a novel that reads like a memoir, and she leaves us in the dark as to how autobiographical it may be.
