Liat and Hilmi meet inside a Greenwich Village café in a New York City that had just been forever changed by the September 11 terrorist attacks. Their attraction is immediate. Their love is inevitable and life altering.
In those moments when we talk and talk and talk, I feel like I have been a sort of enigma to myself, a difficult riddle to solve, he has come along to know me and to answer all my questions … I feel I am almost becoming him, so close to him and infused with him that I can practically feel what it is like to be him.”
And yet it is an impossible, forbidden love — one that threatens both of their unique understandings of identity, cultural heritage and freedom to choose. Liat is from Israel and Hilmi is from the occupied West Bank. They are our star-crossed lovers, our modern-day Romeo and Juliet.
This is the story of today’s Velshi Banned Book Club feature, “All the Rivers” by Dorit Rabinyan. It is based on Rabinyan’s very real love affair with late Palestinian artist Hasan Hourani when she was in her 20s.
Rabinyan skillfully captures the speed and intensity of real love with short chapters, direct and illustrative observations, and pointed dialogue. The reader is swept away just as quickly as Liat, our narrator and protagonist, is. From the moment Liat and Hilmi met in the café, the reader is fiercely rooting for them. And yet, as immediate as Liat and Hilmi’s love story is, their cultural and political differences are ever-present and intrinsic to their relationship. The moments that make this clear — including particularly pointed phone calls between Liat and her sister — feel like coming up for air after diving under water. Ultimately, “All the Rivers” tells two stories: love of country and love of each other. Then it asks its readers to consider whether they can both co-exist.
There is a pervasive nostalgia throughout “All the Rivers”: phone calls made on land lines, a magnet for a taxi company stuck to a refrigerator…
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