The Almond Tree – Book review

The Almond Tree

Michelle Cohen Corasanti

Garnet Publishing, 2012

£7.99

I would like to be generous in my review of this book, but that’s no easy matter. Sure enough, the author gives a graphic description of the horrors visited upon a Palestinian family from 1955 onwards and culminating in a searing account of the consequences of Operation Cast Lead and the siege of Gaza. The Almond Tree is Michelle Cohen Corasanti’s first novel, and she is well informed of the details of Israeli apartheid.

A Jewish American, she spent seven years living in Israel where she witnessed first-hand the horrors of the occupation and feels bad about it. She wants to tell the world about these horrors and chooses to do this via the medium of the novel. For her this is a novel of atonement. Unfortunately, her writing veers more in the direction of Mills & Boone than Ian McEwan. The book is strong in plot, but the characters are one dimensional and lacking in complexity. Curiously, she chooses a first person narrative to tell the story of her main protagonist, Ichmad. This attempt to occupy the mind of a Palestinian is both politically distasteful and a literary failure.

Ichmad is the eldest son of an Israeli-Palestinian family whose father is unjustly imprisoned,

a baby sister is killed by an Israeli landmine, another sister succumbs to the effects of

tear gas, and a brother is maimed after being pushed from scaffolding by a brutish Israeli

workman – and all this in the first fifty pages ! But Ichmad is a brilliant physicist. With

the guidance of his ever patient and forbearing father he deploys his genius to steer his

way to a better life for himself and his family via a scholarship to the Hebrew University, a

professorship in New York, a marriage to an alluring American blonde, and – wait for it – a

Nobel prize.

Indeed, collaboration is the unacknowledged theme of this novel. Ichmad collaborates with

Mordecai, his mentor in the scientific arena, and thereby gains access to wealth and fortune

of the Israeli/American scientific establishment. With this he can redeem himself by funding

the education of his many children and nephews as well as providing a smart new house for his family in Israel. He steers clear of political action and simply pays his way to a clearer conscience.

Corasanti does not seem to see the difference between collaboration and co-operation

and so her solution that “co-operation between Palestinians and Israelis offers the only real

hope for peace” is as simplistic as it is banal.

“The Almond Tree” individualises the Palestine-Israeli conflict in true American fashion.

Individual brilliance leads to individual riches which trickle down to make life tolerable

for the impoverished Palestinians. Corasanti is a lawyer by trade but, curiously, makes

little reference to the illegality of the occupation or the myriad human rights abuses daily

inflicted on the Palestinians. She claims to have spent a lot of time mixing with Palestinians

in her years at the Hebrew University. But NO Palestinian name appears in her list of

acknowledgements. I wonder why?

Phil Chetwynd