THE ANTI-POPPINS
Penguin
West Bank native Shehadeh, writing a letter to his father in 1971.
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It's a nasty, thankless gig, the nanny business. In Marjorie Leet Ford's novel, The Diary of an American Au Pair (Anchor, $13), young Melissa learns this lesson the hard way. Suddenly unemployed in San Francisco, Melissa postpones her wedding and jets to Europe to be an au pair. Her visions of Mary Poppins-like whimsy expire within about 90 seconds of her arrival at the Haig-Ereildouns' drab London home. The lady of the house is, quite plainly, a bitch. The kids are a bratty 11-year-old princess; a death-obsessed 9-year-old boy; and a wild, shrieking 3-year-old who feigns deafness. Both of the family's homesthe other one's in Scotlandare dark, dreary, and frigid. And Mrs. H-E runs a tight ship. In her eyes, Melissa can do nothing right.
The story's based heavily on Ford's experience as a London au pair, and the funyes, there is somelies in the details. Stingy Mrs. H-E makes five people in a row bathe in the same shallow tub of waterMelissa's last, of course. Meanwhile, Melissa has to teach the "deaf" toddler to speak. She also suffers the daily humiliations of the English-American language-pronunciation barrier (Diary was originally published in 2001 as Do Try to Speak as We Do and has been reissued now to cash in on The Nanny Diaries).
Melissa's refuge is back in her room with her diary, where she captures every brutal detail with devious humor. Some of the best passages involve food. Fleshy Melissa likes to eat (she takes kindly to the European fondness for butter), and her stories of daily life tend to revolve around meals. There's even a love story, too. Or, rather, two sparring love stories, but they're less intriguing than Melissa's litany of nanny-related woes. Katie Millbauer
Marjorie Leet Ford will read at Third Place Books (17171 Bothell Way N.E., 206-366-3333), 7 p.m. Wed., May 7.
LOSING HISTORY
We're so used to hearing shrill, calculatedly one-sided rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian conflictfrom Likudniks and the "Arab street" on down to the columnists in this newspaperthat it comes as something of a holy miracle when a voice emerges with passion, intelligence, and some measure of balance. There's no doubt that West Bank human-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh despises the Israeli occupation. But among the many virtues of his memoir, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (Penguin, $14, new in paper), is its willingness to face up to the Palestinians' own failures of character. Shehadeh struggles with that issue throughout his book, brilliantly interweaving it with a portrait of lifelong conflict with his father.
Born in Ramallah in 1951, Raja is no stone-throwing refugee urchin but a sickly, sensitive childone smothered by his overprotective mother and desperate for the approval of his gruff, emotionally distant father. Raja's worldview is dominated by a fixation on "luminous" Jaffa, the lost, cosmopolitan paradise of the Palestinians, from which his family was forced to flee in 1948. By contrast, he writes of Ramallah, "Here was only brown thistle and stone, an arid land without hope or future."
The Palestinian obsession with turning back the clock; the refusal to take any steps to improve their own society for fear it would imply some kind of acceptance of the status quo; the fixation with a mythic goal of total victory and annihilation of "the Zionist entity"all these delusions are what Raja's father, Aziz, a distinguished attorney, spends his life combating. In 1967, he was the first prominent Palestinian to call for a peaceful two-state solution with Israel. He tries to promote a society of laws among his people but is branded a "traitor" by Palestinian leadership.
After an escape to the bright lights and louche lifestyle of pre-civil war Beirut to attend university, followed by law school in London and a rather too-earnestly depicted period of soul-searching, Raja returns to the West Bank in 1976 to join his father's law firm. But the conflict with Aziz only becomes more intense, the search for acceptance ever more futile. Entering his mid-30s and still unmarried, Raja rises to some international prominence by investigating human-rights abuses by the Israeli military and poking holes in the legality of Israeli settlement policies. To Aziz, this is all useless effort: Instead of joining the tired chorus of Palestinian complaint, Raja should be advancing his own career, having a family, and seeking a practical solution that would end the occupation. "What was the use of wasting time diagnosing the disease when we already knew the remedy?" his father wonders.
The mix of intimate autobiography and lawyerly career review is not always a smooth one in Strangers (which frustratingly ends in the '80s, with just a couple of recent postscriptssurely a follow-up is due). But for the most part, this is a powerfully vivid and articulate bookwritten in Shehadeh's own superb Englishthat portrays the conflicts and choices of educated people whose conflicts and choices actually matter. Shehadeh is both a meticulous documentarian and a literary writer, and he has passages of astonishing lyricism; in two of the most memorable sections, he assumes the role of omniscient narrator and describes events from his father's point of view. Idolizing the man with whom he never quite got along, Shehadeh has painted a portrait of Aziz that is profound and inspiringqualities notably missing from most of what we read today about the Middle East.
