Thou Shall Learn Hebrew
Arabesques by Anton Shammas, A Linguistic Refugee and Literary Diplomacy
Anton Shammas celebrates understanding and discerns peace in cultural noise fit for a modern-day Babel: in shrapnel, family, deep-seeded conflict, or love for the land. In the fictive autobiography, Shammas’ composition or literary technique navigates an identity crisis. As a linguistic refugee of Arabic and Hebrew, Shammas experiments with an ability to inhabit and communicate opposing beliefs with respect to each side. He strays from his mother tongue and writes Arabesques in Hebrew, which sparks a conversation between two different cultures led on similar grounds. Parallel to Shammas’ exploration of an individual’s identity, its translation into the wider society, the reflection in this research is just as incomplete because the novel’s original Hebrew form is tailored and interpreted into English. (more…)