Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

Ten months after the wedding, they had their first child,

Araab, named after the singer Ibrahim Muhammad Saleh, who went by the stage name Abu Arab.

Bassam himself became Abu Araab, abu meaning...

What he feared most of all was that Araab would end up in prison.

In the early 1990s Palestinian riot paraphernalia became popular among a small clique of Japanese teenagers.

In a letter to Rami, Bassam wrote that one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

While in flight, birds position themselves in order to gain lift from the bird in front.

It doesn’t matter to them where they speak.

It is always the same story, heard differently in each place. Finite words on an infinite plane.

Constantin Brâncuși’s bird sculptures—considered

most beautiful works of art of the twentieth century—the

My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar.

story I want to tell you starts and ends on one particular day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.

was a young soldier fighting the October ’73 war in Sinai, a horrible war,

One of these children was my daughter, Smadar.

my daughter, Smadar. She was born on the eve of Yom Kippur, in September 1983, in a hospital in Jerusalem.

grape of th...

Nurit taught in the Hebrew University.

She was the daughter of a general.

fourth of September, 1997, just a few days before Yom Kippur,

three suicide bombers blew themselves up

including three little girls. One of these girls was our Smadari.

you see this sight which you will never be able to forget for the rest of your life. Your daughter. On a steel tray. And you will never be the same.

Smadar was buried next to her grandfather, General Matti Peled, a true fighter for peace, a professor, a Knesset member.

the eighth day, everybody goes back to their normal, everyday business, and you’re left alone. Without your daughter.

What are you going to do with this new you, this father without a daughter,

first choice is obvious: revenge.

If you kill one of mine, I will kill ten of yours.

A stone leads to a bullet. And another suicide bomber leads to another air strike. And it goes on and on. And on.

the awful truth, the Arabs were just a thing to me, remote and abstract and meaningless.

Like every Israeli, I knew they were there, and I pretended I knew them, even pretended I liked some of them,

A real Palestinian was a man on the dark side of the moon. This is my shame. I understand it as my shame.

real Palestinian was a man on the dark side of the moon. This is my shame. I

don’t excuse myself at all.

after a while you start asking yourself questions,

you start asking yourself questions, you know, we’re not animals, we can use our brains,

we can use our brains, we use our ...

Will killing anyone bring my da...

in a very gradual, complicated way you come over to the other side: you start asking what happened to her, and why?

How could such a thing take place? What could cause someone to be that angry, that mad, that desperate, that hopeless, that stupid, that pathetic, that he is willing to blow himself up alongside a girl, not even fourteen years old?

What could cause someone to be that angry, that mad, that desperate, that hopeless, t...

What made him?

Did I teach him this? Did his government teach him this? Did my government?

year after Smadar was killed, I met a man who changed my life.

I met a man who changed my life.

Yitzhak Frank...

was certain that this guy was a right-winger, a fascist, that he eats Arabs for breakfast.

But we started talking and he told me about his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994.

his son Arik, a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered...

this organization, the Parents Circle, that he had created—people who lost their loved ones, Palestinian and Isra...