My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century Book

This is an astonishing biography, one in which the process of recovering narrative is as transparent as the goal of recording one person's life. Hoffman, an American-born, Israeli Jew, writes deftly, expressing incredibly complicated moments of history, emotional landscapes, and political debates as if they were the simplest things in the world. Her gift is quite astounding, as is her commitment to this book - the hours she spent cross-referencing documents of all kinds with the oral history of scattered communities of people throughout the Middle East is awe-inspiring. I deeply appreciated her respect for the ways in which stories are living things, and history no more and no less than a collection of those stories.

This book - and the life of Taha, at the very center of it - provides a serious, measured critique of process of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands during and after 1948. There is no escaping the loss and heartache at the center of the text - but Hoffman writes that story while also recovering others; talking to the leader of the division of the Israeli army, for example, that attacked Taha's village in 1948, a man who would later be kicked out of the army for condemning Israel's actions toward Lebanon in 1982. She talks to Jewish poets, Arab intellectuals, quotes from newspapers, letters, and military records. Her work is painstaking, and the result is a beautiful rumination on the power of art, of poetry, and of simple compassion amid so much loss. I loved this book a great deal.