Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810137
Pages: 400
Publication Date: June 10, 2019

Khoury engages his own oeuvre in playful metafictional ways, along with real and invented scholarly texts, and larger Palestinian and Israeli literary histories to which this book is a timely and essential contribution. He rejects didacticism — “My story isn’t an attempt to prove something” — pirouetting between saying and unsaying, creating a mass of competing meanings from which Adam’s tormented psychology emerges. If Khoury makes any argument, however, it is that the expression of an “unadorned truth” is impossible, since all language is symbolic and metaphoric; words are weighed down by their histories...For all his narrative twisting and disavowals, Khoury gives us a vivid glimpse of the unspeakable.
—Isabella Hammad, The New York Times

For Khoury, who was born in 1948 and whose life has been marked by almost continuous war, My Name is Adam marks the achievement of a long-held wish, dating back to his work as a member of Fatah in the late sixties and early seventies, to write a great epic about the Nakba ... (Khoury) listen(s) to the way that Palestinians have lived with the history of catastrophe, not by creating alternative narratives, but by cultivating silence and secrecy, shoring up fragments against their ruin.
—Joshua Craze, Asymptote

Khoury insists that it is impossible to separate the stories of Palestinian and Jewish victimization, but his efforts to accompany the silence of the victims with their stories provide a generous and expansive terrain to think of histories of violence, of their remnants in the present, and of the complexities of survival.
—Shir Alon, World Literature Today

My Name is Adam is framed as the notebooks of Palestinian writer Adam Dannoun . . . Each of the chapters from the unfinished novel are subtitled 'Point of Entry,' an echo of the process of writing a novel, or of creating an identity, or of navigating the many checkpoints in a segregated and securitized Palestine . . . The other notebooks are Adam’s personal account . . . Adam gathers stories from the community, peeling back layers of stifled memory. These sections feel more urgent and self-assured . . . narratively messier, darker, and more ambiguous.
—James Folta, "A Small Press Book We Love," Literary Hub