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Clair Hajaj

Ishmael’s Oranges by Claire Hajaj

Book review by Amy Norman

“Why does history only ever repeat its sorrows and not its joys?,” asks Claire Hajaj in her debut novel Ishmael’s Oranges. It’s a pertinent question because, if nothing else, the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, covered in the novel, is a lesson in history repeating with weary and tragic familiarity. There’s certainly little cause for joy, or hope, in the recently failed peace talks or in the violent and unnecessary deaths of children and other civilians happening right now in the Middle East.

An author and journalist with shared Palestinian and Jewish heritage, Hajaj is perhaps in a better position than most to look at how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affects people, families and everyday lives on both sides of the border. And she isn’t afraid to ask difficult questions about how far people will go for love, for family, for faith or for country.

In the novel, Jude, a Jewish girl from a comfortable middle-class family in northern England, spends her adolescence at odds with her faith, going out of her way to distance herself from her Jewishness. Salim, or Sal, has no bigger ambition as a child than to harvest his family’s orange trees in Jaffa, until the 1948 war means he has to abandon his home and come to terms with the new state of Israel. When the pair meet in 1960s London and fall in love, Hajaj has both characters look deep inside themselves to work out where their priorities lie. The big question, of course, as they build a life together, is whether their love will be strong enough to overcome their differences.

When things are going well between Sal and Jude, everything seems sickly sweet; you’ve never met a couple who are so in love, whose love can defeat the obstacles they face so easily. Doubts are cast aside quickly; Sal says to Jude “None of that matters any more” and “You’re worth everything that comes.” This, for me, is the weak spot of the novel; everything is just too nice, too easy, lacking real emotion.

But once the couple have children of their own to raise, it becomes clear their domestic harmony was too good to be true, and it’s when things start to go wrong that Hajaj develops her characters more. Even though Sal had to flee from his childhood home, he never abandoned hope that he would return one day, even when all the odds are against him. And it’s partly this that acts as a barrier to him forming a new life. As Sal becomes obsessed with returning to the past, “the doors of their home slowly opened to the world outside, and something dangerous had entered – ghosts of loss and disappointment.” Sal and Jude’s relationship with each other can’t possibly work because their backgrounds are too ingrained in them and, notably, neither is willing to make the huge compromises that are necessary.

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Read another article and see two of her family pictures