Inspired by personal experience, this compelling and moving novel tells the story of an Eritrean man called Dawoud and his quest to find a place of safety, somewhere he can belong. He’s on the run from a dark and difficult past and thinks he’s found a way out. Although not a Jew, he invents for himself a new identity, Davit, so that he can join a group of Ethiopian Jews, the Falash Mura, and legally emigrate to Israel, where a better life might await. However, his hopes are dashed when he finally arrives, as he has to confront the prejudice experienced by all dark-skinned immigrants to the country, and he has to face the fact that he might have to forge yet another identity. His ability to inhabit such different identities comes through in the stories he constantly tells the authorities, fellow exiles and those who befriend him, often long, involved stories, and whether these are true or fantasy the reader has to decide. It’s a novel of resilience, survival, the longing for home and belonging, the desire to find a place in a world that constantly tries to exclude him and others like him. Well-constructed, well-paced, and written with insight and perceptiveness, I found this an absorbing read, and an interesting glimpse into the life of Ethiopian Jews in Israel.

It’s a story about a man searching for his place in the world. Dawoud is running away from his past and tries to fit in various places along his journey through NorthAfrica and Israel.

Thanks to this book I learned something about Eritrea. It’s not much, but it’s something. It opened my mind to new things I had no idea about and I’m going to read more about the history of Eritrea.

I had problems with following chronology, I would sometimes get lost which part was before and which was after, but it may be coming from my lack of knowledge.

I was tired of all the lies of the main character. I know his situation wasn’t easy, and I can’t really relate, however, there really were some moments he didn’t have to lie, but he chose it anyway. For a person that wanted to find his own place, to feel he belonged somewhere - it’s not the way to go, not so, so deep in the lies. What is more, Dawoud changed his story, his lies, so many times I really got confused at some point. What was a lie and what wasn’t?

However, the story does give food for thought. As I mentioned above, it shows some of the history of Eritrea and it’s really eye-opening. Life of an immigrant is an easy one; there’s a lot of anger, humiliation, injustice and alienation. Dawoud is lost and the story portrays it well.

“Black Foam” is a difficult novel to read in many ways. First, it jumps around in time and location, making it appear disjointed and disorienting, and much of it takes place in the protagonist’s head, as he makes up stories to fit whatever circumstances in which he finds himself. He variously goes by many names also to fit into these varying circumstances. The apparent truth is that he was born of an encouraged yet forbidden sexual liaison between a female and a male soldier in the Eritrean military. Though such a sexual liaison violates Muslim laws, such unions are encouraged to give birth to the next generation of soldiers. The children of such unions are called “Free Gadli” which translates to “fruits of the struggle” in Eritrean.

Perhaps the disorienting structure of the story is meant merely to reflect the haphazard life that the protagonist has led. As a young child, he was cared for collectively by a group of female soldiers, not ever allowed to bond too closely with any one of them. Then, as a teenager, he is forced into military training himself. Although it’s not clear exactly how he extricates himself from the military, a tale he tells when searching for refuge outside of Africa indicates that he ran away successfully, but not before suffering punishment for prior attempts. Although his given name appears to be Adal, we first meet him in his incarnation as Dawit.

After he escapes Eritrea and makes his way to Ethiopia, he finds his way to a camp organized and operated by a Jewish organization. There he claims to be one of the Falashmura, a group of Ethiopians said to be descendants of Jews forced to hide their true religion and live as Christians among their brethren. There he asserts his “right” to go to Israel and live as a Jew. Wherever he finds himself, however, he believes
people look at him with suspicion and disdain. In the camp he senses that the true Falashmura see through his guise, and some even do spit and throw stones at him. When he wanders outside of the camp, the villagers appear to envy him for the privileges he has as a Jew. He always is most fearful of being found out to be Eritrean, as then everyone would be united in their hatred of him, as Eritreans are seen as being at the bottom of the food chain, particularly those of his origin.

The only time Dawit finally feels he belongs is at the end of the book when he is taken in by a Black shopkeeper in the Old City of Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, even though the shopkeeper immediately identifies him not only as Eritrean but also knows exactly which part of Eritrea Dawit is from; he knows this just by the shape of Dawit’s face. The shopkeeper and others in his community are descendants of people who immigrated to Jerusalem at different times during the preceding century from all over the African continent and for many different reasons. Some immigrated from a desire to be close to the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque, some went to battle Israel when it was declared a state in 1948, and others arrived even earlier, brought by the British to lay the tracks of Mandatory Palestine’s railway. Nevertheless, all of them consider themselves Palestinians and unite in their dislike of Israelis, though they aren’t fully accepted by their Palestinian neighbors due to the color of their skin.

Dawit feels a kinship with the shopkeeper and his neighbors because they seem to be living just as he always has, on the surface of wherever he found himself, like foam, without being allowed under the surface, into the depths of any given place. The book not only demonstrates a sad portrait of a person seeking simply just to survive but also reflects a large part of today’s world where innumerable people from all over the globe seek little more than just to survive. It’s a dilemma facing most of the civilized world.

Thank you to NetGalley, Amazon Crossing, and award-winning Eritrean author Haji Jabir and the book’s translators for providing me an advanced reader’s digital copy of this book. I am leaving this review VOLUNTARILY.

3.5~4★
“He was an outcast here: Most of the people in Beta Israel were Ethiopian Falasha, like this elderly lady, but others were Ethiopians trying to join the camp to find their own form of salvation. They were unwelcome. Then there were Eritreans, like him, who were hated by both the Ethiopian Falasha and the Ethiopians.”

This was a difficult read for me for many reasons. Reading about people struggling to escape persecution is always hard, because I feel guilty for not knowing more about it.

The narrator describes how he went from Eritrea to Israel. He is called variously Dawoud, Dawit, or David, depending where he is and which nationality he is pretending to be. He is resourceful and determined, and manages to get himself coached by Saba, a woman who helps him and gives him a history, because he tells us he has none.

As he moves between countries, dodging, hiding, being questioned, he cleverly twists his stories to suit his interrogator. The author also moves us back and forth between the parts of his story, using the different names, Dawoud, Dawit, or David, which helps to give us a sense of where he is. His main concern is to get safely to Israel and freedom. If he has to ‘be’ a Jew to do so, fine. He studies.

There are long passages where he is being interviewed by a European to decide his fate. His story becomes like the 1001 nights – a more interesting aspect added to his story every so often to keep the man listening to him. Finally, he realises that the European has heard every possible reason or excuse a migrant can give and is about to turn him away.

“He thought about getting up and walking out of the meeting, since his fate was already clear. But then a new idea took hold of him, filling him with energy. He would tell the truth. He would tell his own story, and the European would hear something he’d never heard before. He would tell his own great secret for the sake of his salvation.

Again, he lifted his head. The European’s lips still held the traces of a smirk, but this quickly slid off when he saw David staring into his eyes so firmly it confused him. The European set the pen aside and resettled his thick glasses, then clasped his hands and placed them under his chin, looking keenly at David.

David said: ‘I’m Free Gadli.’

The translator faltered, then dropped into silence and turned to the session’s secretary, who hadn’t written a single letter but was instead staring at David in astonishment. The European was confused as he saw the young men’s expressions but couldn’t understanding what was going on. He angrily ordered his translator to explain. The translator looked at David, as if giving him one last chance to take it back. Then he cleared his throat and translated in a low voice: ‘He says he’s one of the “fruits of the struggle.” ’

The European understood nothing from this literal translation, so the translator had to explain the meaning. ‘In Eritrea, that’s what children are called if they’re born of a relationship between soldiers on the battlefield that goes against religious law.’

The European knit his brow and said with great interest: ‘This is new.’ Then he urged David to tell his story.

It was only at this moment that David felt the enormity of his decision. It wasn’t easy for him to pull from his chest a story he’d grown used to hiding in the dark. But on the other hand, he wanted to survive, no matter what.”

If I understand this, David claims he is one of the several soldiers’ babies, born on the battlefield and shared among a group of new soldier mothers, backpacked into war, nobody never knowing whose baby is whose or who the real parents are.

I don’t know the truth of the history, but judging by the rest of the book, this was indeed David’s history – bred to be a future anonymous fighter for Eritrea.

“ ‘The first time I’d opened my eyes, it was on a battlefield. I had moved from one babysitter to another, and they were all my mother. The fighters took turns tying me to their backs. With them, I would go up hills, down across the plains, and stretch out in the trenches. The first toy I ever played with was an empty Kalashnikov—or maybe it was loaded, who knows! The first word I ever spoke was a bad attempt to imitate the sound of someone ordering an artilleryman to fire. Before that, I had been happy imitating the sounds of shelling, with perfect success.’ ”

It's a tremendous story, told well by its Eritrean author. I feel that it has lost something in translation, over which I sometimes stumbled, which is why I haven’t rated it more highly. But I’m certainly no expert on translation, and the fault may well be mine.

Rather than trust me, have a look at these articles about the author.
https://arablit.org/2019/01/21/eritre...

https://brittlepaper.com/2023/02/erit...

Thanks to NetGalley and AmazonCrossing for the copy for review.

I believe AmazonCrossing publications are generally Read Now for all NetGalley reviewers. They are translations of international literature, some from authors celebrated in their own countries but unknown to many in the English-speaking world. Broaden your reading and expand your mind!

DNF - I wasn't able to connect with the writing style or the format that this story followed. I might try again when it's available via audiobook but, for now, I am setting it aside. The premise sounded so interesting so I am a bit bummed that it didn't work for me.

Stories have one door through which we can enter, after which we spin in their world forever. No matter what we think, there’s no escape from the stories in which we become entangled.



Dawoud is a young Eritrean, a “fruit of the struggle” of the war of independence against Ethiopia, a child of the revolution. Ostracised from society, he begins a journey to a better life, one that will force him to change his name, his identity, almost his whole personality.



We start the book towards the end of this process, with Dawoud now David, described as a “Falasha Mura”, a group of Eritrean Jews promised a new life in Israel. How arrived at this point, and the choices he has to make to get there, form the narrative of this book.



Dawoud is a hard principal character to like. He is duplicitous with even those close to him, his attitude to women is far from ideal, and he does some questionable acts on his path to Jerusalem. That said, we are also privy to what he has been through to get to that point. Should we condemn those who lie in extreme circumstances? Creating a new identity and past to find a better life seems like a price worth paying, especially with so many hurdles ahead of him.



And hurdles there are. Dawoud has to raise an astronomical sum of money at one point to gain access to a refugee camp, and this is followed by a fantastically toe-curling scene in front of a UN official, a man who holds futures in his hand and is bored of seeing “the same old story”. As a Brit, it gave me some insight into why people feel forced to sit in tiny boats and risk the Channel, and any book that helps a reader draw real-life parallels in areas such as these must be commended.



All in all, it’s a book about what it is to be human, the stories we tell and the lengths we go to. A real surprise for me, a great read, and one I recommend completely. Huge thanks to @translatedgems for organising a talk with the author, and to @hajijabir and @sawadhussein for such fascinating insights.

Thank you NetGalley and AmazonCrossing, Amazon Crossing for accepting my request to read and review Black Foam.

Published: 02/07/23

I have mixed feelings right now and throughout the book. The story is not what I expected from start to finish. While I could empathize with the main character, I didn't understand why he made some choices, probably insecurities.

He is the story. He wanted, like all people, to be accepted, to be heard, and have people listen to him; quite frankly, he wanted to be seen. Sometimes as I was reading I could sense his feelings, and could relate while in a vastly different setting, my own feelings of being invisible in a room. He struggled throughout.

This is not a feel good book. It is a thinker. It is for smart people.

This story has made me a bit better as a person.

Deep dive into the surface.......

I just finished this and I feel the loss. Although the story is not an easy happily ever after but goes into the reality of what it means to be an Eritrean on the run, I'm still missing the words and Dawood.

Jabir's writing is profoundly beautiful in it's simple quiet. For a person writing about foam that floats on the surface, he dives deep. He examines what being a refugee asking for asylum means to people who grew up, lived and coped in a different culture than the new country of asylum. So the rules of the first country do not count in the second country, neither do the values and the knowledge gained. You are judged on the story presented and the whims of the persons adjudicating with scarce recourse for appeals.

I knew that Eritrea was on the list of countries my country accepted refugees from but I had no idea of it's history and why people are fleeing from there. Now I have a very slight idea and a willingness to know more. Thank you Haji Jabir.

Me being me, I did go look up some more on the internet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-57187736 this totally complements the story being told here.

An ARC kindly given by author/publisher via Netgalley

3.5 stars

I am grateful to Amazon Crossing for sending me an advanced copy of this book for review.

This is a hard one because I found so much greatness in this novel yet there were issues. This is my first time reading from this author and I was excited to read a novel by an Eritrean author that is set across multiple countries, and from a type of perspective I have not read about before. This is a story of a person who has no home, who felt unwelcome in every place they lived, and who in searching for a place where they belong loses who they are.

One of my favorite things about this novel was how there were layers of stories being told, leaving a reader unsure of what is truth and fabrication. The character tells us the story of their journey but woven throughout this story are other stories that he shares with the people he meets. These stories really emphasize what it is like to not have a personal identity. The main character himself goes by about five different names as we go through this book and there is even a moment when he needs to introduce himself to someone and has a moment of internal confusion when deciding who he should introduce himself as. This is because not only does he have multiple names, but each name comes with its own history, its own baggage, and almost its own personality.

The author did a good job of showing the desperation of the situation and of a person whose life has been shaped by the strife that they were born into and surrounded by, and the lengths to which someone will go to escape the harsh realities that they have been exposed through from a young age. This also gives an interesting account of an immigrant experience of someone trying to flee a terrible and dangerous situation, how difficult that can be, and how at times the system fails people who need it the most.

However, we come to the problems... This book was not easy to read because the MC was so inconsistent throughout the novel. Now this may be the intent of the Author to expand upon how conflicted, confused, and traumatized this character is. The problem is the character often did things that made no sense. This is our perspective character, so if he tells the reader that a moment is a very serious moment that he is terrified of and then he proceeds to treat it like a game in the next sentence it makes no sense and kicks you right out of the story. This happens many times because this story (and this is another problem I had with this book) is very repetitive. We spend a lot of time with this character simply walking around and thinking the same thoughts and doing what appeared to be useless and self-destructive actions, and while this may be interesting storytelling once or twice, this happened entirely too many times for such a short book. Not only that, but we spend a lot of time with the character talking about women and relaying to us his repressed sexual desires, which once again might have been fine once or twice but happens entirely too much in this novel.

Overall, I think the experience and the setting as well as the social commentary of this novel make it worth the read. I also think that the author does have some skill in writing which makes it likely that I will pick up something else from them in the future. However, there definitely were issues that made this a less enjoyable experience and I thought it would have been. I would recommend this novel to readers interested in historical fiction and African fiction.

While on the run Dyede becomes many things A sheep farmer a fake hero a fake Jew and many other things but it’s all geared towards him trying to find his place in the world. After things changed in his country where he was a soldier he had to flee and when he couldn’t pay the people helping him get to the refugee camp he had to flee there as well. This is why we find him at the airport being haunted by the toothless Jewish woman from the community he “belong to“ as the timeline goes back-and-forth between current day and his not so distant past we learned the complete story and all what a tail it is. I really liked diet and throughout each stage of his journey despite the many lies he will tell you still route for him. I love books like this that hold you even after you put it down. When you’re done you wonder what would they do in certain situations and that is the kinship I felt with diet. I think The author did a masterful job bringing the story to life. I love the narrative the lol moments the story flowed nicely and you didn’t want to put the book down. A true five star read definitely one of my favorite books this year. I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

I chose this book because I have been trying to diversify my reading by choosing stories set in countries that I don’t typically gravitate toward. And while this book definitely got me into other countries, the more I read the more I found myself tiring of the story. At first I was hooked, but as I kept going, the story seemed to get more complex and complicated in ways that just drug on instead of trying to wrap things up. I don’t even know how it ends because I was becoming upset and frustrated with myself for continuing to read despite not enjoying it.

Such a pleasure to read Eritrean literature for the first time. The author of Black Foam, Haji Jabir, is an Eritrean journalist working for Al Jazeera, and is based in Doha.

Adal/Dawoud/David/Dawit is a man of multiple identities, on a journey to find a place to call home. He’s not even rooted in the place he was born—he is the child of liberation fighters, born on the front, and never to know which of the women who pass him from arm to arm is his mother.

Echoing his childhood, Adal/Dawoud/David/Dawit passes from place to place as a refugee, from Eritrea, to Ethiopia, where he poses as a Falasha Jew (from the Beta Israel community) so as to join a group of refugees who are about to migrate to Israel. Once in Israel, he still feels excluded from that group (which is itself not fully accepted by the locals), and at first he seeks to blend in with other, mostly undocumented African migrants, and then later with the descendants of Africans who settled in Jerusalem. “Black foam” refers to how Adal/Dawoud/David/Dawit never truly belongs, how he’s always on the surface of the communities he seeks to join—partly because of their exclusion, but, as becomes increasingly clear, also because of him.

I didn’t enjoy the writing (or perhaps translators’) style—staccato, disjointed, in places, and generally uneven; but this works with the fact that I certainly didn’t like the protagonist, although I felt empathy for his struggles. He’s not easy to like: he lies all the time, and he has unsavory thoughts about women. But then, who knows if we’d like everyone we met if we knew their deepest thoughts and predilections? Even when we knew the reasons for those? What’s clear is that Adal/Dawoud/David/Dawit is a man who has been shaped by cruel circumstances, and his inevitable arc is heart-breaking.

The research that went into this moving and important novel is impressive. I’m left with impressions, ideas, and new knowledge, all wrapped up in story, which is the great work of good literature.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Amazon Crossing for this ARC.

I had high hopes for this novel which satisfied my curiosity on some levels, but overall it wasn't my cup of tea.

The young Eritrean protagonist is a chameleon, going by various different names and claiming whichever religion suits, to further his goals. There is nothing sinister about those goals - they are at the same time both simple and enormously complex. He is seeking nothing more than freedom and belonging.

I appreciated the insight to the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the introduction to Beta Israel. The final chapter, where the inspiration for the story was revealed, made me sit up and take notice, but didn't really change my perception of the novel.

I wanted to like this book, but as I read deeper and uncovered more about the protagonist, he became a self-serving individual, unlike the scared refugee who has to reinvent himself as he tries to find an identity that will allow him to live a life of freedom.

Narrator Adal (or David, or Dawoud, or Dawit, depending on which character he is playing) takes readers on the erratic journey of a man searching for himself and his identity. Though a bit confusing to start, it becomes abundantly clear over the course of the first third of Black Foam that the story is about a single man who becomes increasingly hard to trust as the novel progresses, as we learn that he is dishonest both with other characters in the novel and with his own narration. While the narrator himself identifies this as a self-preservation mechanism as he tries to carve a new life for himself ("This was how he dealt with things--turning everything around into an exciting story."), though following a scene in which the narrator muses about his own interaction with a British immigration officer and later with Israeli police, I also wondered whether this device worked as a metacomment about the (unfortunate) way refugee stories might often be treated as dishonest and interchangeable by outsiders (especially by those in positions of power, like in the case of immigration officials, police officers). The narrative jumps around quite a bit in time (reminiscent almost of the narration in Crabwalk by Günter Grass) and can be at times hard to follow with all of the different names and tales that the narrator is using for himself and his identity. There were a couple of passages that really missed the mark for me, the narrator can be very objectifying of women -- sometimes at length and with disturbing details -- and at other points, he goes on and on about an inanimate object, like a ladder reaching for a window, or the dome of a building, and these I think were meant to be metaphors, but they didn't work for me. However, I have never read a book like this (it was grand in its scope broaching many topics including identity, racism, displacement, and religion/religious experience) nor a book by an Eritean author, and I appreciated the opportunity to read the story and learn about the experiences that Haji Jabir described. Last but not least, in its final pages, Black Foam is dedicated in memory of "young Eritean, Habtom Ouldi Mikael Zaroum, and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge this dedication.

Thank you to NetGalley and Amazon Crossing for an advanced copy of Black Foam in exchange for an honest review.

A powerful read…. a profoundly intimate novel about one man’s tireless attempt to find his place in the world. Four stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

While Black Foam discusses a lot of important topics such as, displacement, corruption in NGOs, homeland, fear of deportation and identity, I didn't really enjoy the writing style and structure of the novel.
As a privileged white immigrant I can only imagine how hard and emotional a journey like this would be.

I'd recommend this to anybody who's interested in the above topics to give it a go. Unfortunately it wasn't a hit for me personally.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

An Eritrean man flees conflict in his country, landing in a refuge camp in Ethiopia, then eventually in Israel. The story follows his efforts to find himself and find his way in each place, all while fearing he will be sent back to Eritrea. This is an excellent exploration of identity and the ultimate narrowing labels create, limiting who one is permitted to be. The story is told with varying timelines side by side, with the author employing a clever device so it’s always clear which timeline we’re in, even while the stories mirror one another. I thought this was terrific.

Black Foam was a fascinating read on many fronts. As well as being a well-written story, it was also interesting to learn about the migration of African Jews to Israel, as it was something I had never heard about before. The book covers several themes, but in particular it highlights the search for 'home' and the difficult experience faced by migrants, both in respect to the authorities and the extant inhabitants of their new cities, who are not always welcoming. A short but thought-provoking piece, Black Foam is definitely well worth a read. It gets four stars from me.