Exile's Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American

Fawaz Turkiook of the week

New York, The Free Press (A division of Macmillan Inc.), 1994 Hard cover, 274 pages Available from: Bookshop at the American Colony Telefax: (02) 6279731 e-mail: usbooks@palnet.com Price: US$ 23 Palestinian writer, Fawaz Turki, was expelled from Palestine in 1949 along with his family, and spent his boyhood in the refugee camps of Beirut. As a young man living in Paris, where he became active in the Palestinian nationalist movement, he met and married an American and returned with her to the United States, only to be quickly caught up in the currents of social protest and rebellion of the 60s - an experience which had a powerfully transformative effect on him, though many years would pass before he realized its actual extent. In "Exile's Return", Turki tells the story of this personal and political odyssey in a highly evocative mem- oir that interweaves scenes of his life as an exile with incidents of his visit, after a forty-year absence, to the Israeli occupied West Bank. Though he continued to think of himself as an exile, Turki writes, during his years in the US he had unconsciously absorbed the liberal values of American society. Now, like any ethnic American in search of his roots, Turki returns to his birthplace wanting badly to identify with native Palestinians of the home ground. But what he finds there is a pattern of com- plexity beyond his expectation, one that leads to a defining moment of ultimate self-revelation.