A Small Door Set in Concrete

One Woman's Story of Challenging Borders in Israel/Palestine

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Pub Date 28 Nov 2019 | Archive Date 20 Dec 2019

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Description

“I was taught from the start not to be silent.”

For years, renowned activist and scholar Ilana Hammerman has given the world remarkable translations of Kafka. With A Small Door Set in Concrete, she turns to the actual surreal existence that is life in the West Bank after decades of occupation.

After losing her husband and her sister, Hammerman set out to travel to the end of the world. She began her trip with the hope that it would reveal the right path to take in life. But she soon realized that finding answers was less important than experiencing the freedom to move from place to place without restriction. Hammerman returned to the West Bank with a renewed joie de vivre and a resolution: she would become a regular visitor to the men, women, and children who were on the other side of the wall, unable to move or act freely. She would listen to their dreams and fight to bring some justice into their lives.

A Small Door Set in Concrete is a moving picture of lives filled with destruction and frustration but also infusions of joy. Whether joining Palestinian laborers lining up behind checkpoints hours before the crack of dawn in the hope of crossing into Israel for a day’s work, accompanying a family to military court for their loved one’s hearing, or smuggling Palestinian children across borders for a day at the beach, Hammerman fearlessly ventures into territories where few Israelis dare set foot and challenges her readers not to avert their eyes in the face of injustice.

Hammerman neither preaches nor politicks. Instead, she engages in a much more personal, everyday kind of activism. Hammerman is adept at revealing the absurdities of a land where people are stripped of their humanity. And she is equally skilled at illuminating the humanity of those caught in this political web. To those who have become simply statistics or targets to those in Israel and around the world, she gives names, faces, dreams, desires.
This is not a book that allows us to sit passively. It is a slap in the face, a necessary splash of cold water that will reawaken the humanity inside all of us.

“I was taught from the start not to be silent.”

For years, renowned activist and scholar Ilana Hammerman has given the world remarkable translations of Kafka. With A Small Door Set in Concrete, she...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780226666310
PRICE $25.00 (USD)
PAGES 296

Average rating from 4 members


Featured Reviews

A heartbreaking story told from the standpoint of a now 80 year old Israeli woman looking back at 3 decades of her travels in Gaza and and the West Bank. She’s a “leftist”, a secular Jew whose humanist philosophy guides her to civil disobedience, taking Palestinians through checkpoints legally and illegally. Her reports on visiting Palestinian friends in Israeli jails show the horrid, violent, and labyrinthian, yes Kafkaesque, bureaucratic and torturous experiences of those friends and family members on the periphery. She employs the third person as a narrative device throughout most of the book except for the last chapter where she switches to 1st person as she revisits her own reportage on the massacres of Gaza residents during the 1st intifada. She knowingly switches between the 1980s and the current situations and her subjects’ viewpoints’ progressions through intelligence agents, children on both sides, soldiers, guards, and her Palestinian family friends. The book is a devastating document of the continuing humanitarian crises, but also shows the author’s loving civil disobedience against Israel’s policies.

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By the end of this harrowing book I was shaking with rage and sorrow. Israeli activist and journalist Ilana Hammerman, now 80 years old, chronicles her life along the Israeli-Palestinian border and her travels and relationships with the people in the West Bank and Gaza. The tragedy, the heartbreak, the absurdity, the wanton cruelty and injustice. She is witness to the daily and never-ending trials and tribulations of the beleaguered Palestinians caught in this seemingly intractable conflict, a witness to policies that perpetuate it. Read it and weep.

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