A Tale of Jewish Assimilation

For some years now the 37-year-old Arab Israeli Hebrew writer Sayed Kashua has been contributing a column to the weekend magazine of Ha'aretz that is a miniature marvel of self-presentation. Kashua writes first-person vignettes in an easy, every-guy voice as if he were just another working stiff, married with kids, who is trying to make his way in the world. If that were all, his little tales would still have a lot going for them. But that is not all. He is an Israeli Arab who writes in Hebrew and has made it within the world of Israeli Jewish journalism and popular culture while remaining proud of his Arab identity and illusionless about the civil disabilities of Israel's Arab citizens. Prized by Hebrew readers for the uniqueness of his voice, Kashua has been vilified in the Arab press for being a cultural collaborator. Kashua has turned the dilemmas of living entangled in these two identities into an opportunity for antic observation rather than portentous agonizing. He has a gift for taking the small absurdities of everyday existence and the comic humiliations of family life, themselves served up with self-effacing deadpan humor, and making them comment on the bigger, and often darker, contradictions of his life and the two cultures in which he lives.

Take, for example, the confusions in a column from March 2012 entitled "A Clean Getaway." (Happily, Kashua's columns can be read online in the English edition of Ha'aretz.) In this sketch, Kashua, or someone very much like him, works among Israeli Jews on a TV series in an office building in West Jerusalem, whose cleaning staff, unsurprisingly, is comprised of Arabs. Kashua is embarrassed by sitting in an office with an air conditioner and a computer while other Arabs are lugging around mops and pails. His improvised solution is to lock his office and, without explanation, refuse to have it cleaned; when the grime gets too much for him, he does it himself. He can't start up a chatty conversation in Arabic with the cleaners because he is self-conscious about how they will view his mixing equally among the Jewish writers and producers. So he contrives to get up before dawn, bring a raft of cleaning equipment from home to work, scour his office, and hide the equipment behind the couch. Hoping to make his getaway after dark, Kashua is importuned by a cleaner, who addresses him in Hebrew because he does not realize that Kashua is an Arab. The column concludes with this exchange: