A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall

Much of the news coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian War focuses on the macro issues. There is not a lot of coverage on the topics and issues of the daily lives of the people. This book is the recounting of a bus accident that occurred prior to the current war. The bus was full of Palestinian kindergarteners on their way to a field trip on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It is a recounting of the chaos of the emergency services responding to the accident scene and then the complications of daily life that prevented the parents from getting to their kids. The book sheds light on the daily living conditions of ordinary Palestinians and how those conditions influence the outcomes for these families impacted by the accident. Be warned—this is a gut wrenching, heartbreaking story.

I often feel helpless when I read the news. I can’t do much from my small corner of the world. What I can do is try to understand what is going on and sometimes that means looking beyond the dominant narratives that are being presented. This book is an excellent opportunity to do that.

This book was on my TBR list for awhile and I finally got around to reading it. Overall it was enjoyable, even if the ending was sad. My biggest issue is with title. The story of Abed Salama is maybe only 1/4th of the book.

The majority of the book revolves around life in current Palestine and Israel and the situation that people there find themselves in and the history that has lead up to their difficult situation while this is obviously important, it doesn’t need to be the focus of a book that is supposed to be about a man desperately searching for his son who was in a horrible bus accident.

More focus should have been spent on Abed and his experience searching for his son, why justice wasn’t served for Palestinian families whose children died and what could be done to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. There was just a lot left unsaid and undone; maybe because the author didn’t have those answers. This would have been a great short story or better served with a different title that didn’t lead me to expect a different story.

I was given this book for free in exchange for my honest review.

I have talked about this book everywhere since I received this galley last year. This book has been unforgettable. Coincidentally and immensely timely, I wish with all my heart that we could go back in time when this story could've unfolded in reality. The story wrung my heart and the scenarios felt immense and harsh, and yet, reality today is far, far, far more terrible. The story is this book will never ever again happen for tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Thrall writes with acute sensitivity without ever erring on the side of melodrama--the events, the characters' actions are dramatic enough in themselves. And that is where the strength of the book lies. The spare, low-key writing style heightens the charged, tense moments and allows the reader to enter into the emotions of the characters, be they the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinian occupied.

I requested this ARC after seeing Masha Gessen's interview with Nathan Thrall [in Literary Hub]. In their introductory paragraph, Gessen speaks of the "intractable narratives" of Israel/Palestine; Thrall can't make those narratives any more tractable but he does illuminate them. I believed, until I read this book, that I had a reasonably clear understanding of the conditions of Palestinian life under occupation. I did not.

*The* day in A Day in the Life (I'm sure the echo of Ivan Denisovich is intentional) is the one in which Salama's five-year-old son, Milad, was killed in a school-bus accident. I say "accident," and the proximate cause was indeed accidental -- the driver of an 18-wheeler, speeding on a wet, narrow road, smashed into the bus -- but never was any accident, or its aftermath, so overdetermined by the historical conditions under which it took place. Everything from the road conditions, to the age of the school bus, to the route the bus had to take, to, most painfully of all, the long delay before ambulances and firefighters arrived, and the system of permits and checkpoints that prevented private cars from taking burned children to the best hospitals (which were, of course, not in the parts of the Occupied Territories where Palestinians live) was a function of -- well, "settler colonialism" is almost too abstract a term. Some Israeli middle-schoolers responded to news reports of the children's injuries and deaths with glee. On social media. Under their own names. Thrall quotes an Israeli -- a member of a haredi organization that collects the bodies of the dead for burial -- who is not unsympathetic to the bereaved parents but who says that of course he isn't as upset by the deaths of Palestinian children as he would be by the deaths of Jewish children. Any Jew who says otherwise, this man claims, must be lying.

I don't believe it for a minute, but that hardly matters; what matters is that anyone can say such a thing with no apparent shame. What matters is that an entire country has been organized in such a way as to make the worst days of so many people's lives inevitable. Where does such a cycle of dehumanization and vengeance end? Does it ever?

I liked the history in this book and also Abed Salamas story but felt they didn’t come together well. It felt a bit disjointed. Each section was good but together not as strong.