Arabic for Beginners

by Ariela Freedman

Overview

When Hannah accompanies her husband and small children to Jerusalem for the year, she becomes fascinated with a group of expat women at her son’s daycare, as well as a young Palestinian woman named Jenna. As she grows close to Jenna she starts to question her own marriage and her relationship to Israel. A novel of domestic and political ambivalence, Arabic for Beginners is about marriage, motherhood, friendship, nation, and the complicated ways we think of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781988130347
Publisher:	Linda Leith Publishing
Publication date:	03/25/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	302
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2014 Mentorship Program. Arabic for Beginners, published by LLP in 2017, is her first novel, followed by A Joy To Be Hidden (LLP, 2019) and L/a (LLP, 2022). She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia’s Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her husband and two sons.

Editorial Reviews

"A quiet and exquisite portrait of a group of mothers in Israel. Freedman brilliantly captures the existential and alienated state that mothers of young children inhabit. Freedman's work is reminiscent of Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy." —Heather O'Neill, author of Lullabies for Little Criminals "In Arabic for Beginners Ariela Freedman brings to life the kaleidoscopic contradictions and painful paradoxes of life in contemporary Israel/Palestine. As insightful as it is absorbing, Arabic for Beginners brings into sharp relief a young mother's sabbatical year in Jerusalem in the era of the Gaza war. A story of complicated friendships, marriages on the brink, and ambivalence writ large, this is a brave, intelligent and impressive literary debut."—Elaine Kalman Naves, author of The Book of Faith "Delicately observed and strikingly funny, Ariela Freedman's Arabic for Beginners captures the everyday mystery behind adult friendship. This account of a Canadian family's year in Israel is a study of tensions both national and interpersonal, and of the reasons relationships survive or fade away. Freedman's subtle, graceful prose spans the large and the small, the wondrous and the quotidian, as it explores the question of how certain places—and certain people—come to feel like home."—Abigail Deutsch, winner, Shattuck Prize for Criticism

From the Publisher