'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.īook Description Paperback. Once again, I commanded myself not to feel. The world within and around me seemed to fade into the unknown. When I looked behind, I could no longer see the giant shadow of our home.

I knew that the only hope for me was to instantly run in the same direction, leaving my shoe behind.Īs I moved, sounds of distant gunshots and screeching swelled and then subsided. I wanted to cry aloud, hurl their names across the darkness, but dread stifled my voice. Had they just walked into the crowd and left me behind? Fear dug a hole in my heart. But no one answered.Īt that moment, a new wave of fleeing villagers rushed by.Īs they disappeared, everything faded into stillness. “Yamma, Yaba! Help me!” I cried in a hushed voice, lest I attract attention and we all die. But in spite of my desperate attempts to obey my parents’ commands, my three-and-a-half-year-old hands were unable to lace up the one shoe I had put on. My father strained to see the road from behind the mound of clothes and blankets he carried. Mother had secured my baby sister between her arms.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.įather turned to Mother. This book, appropriate for readers young and old, holds literature’s great power: the power to humanize the ‘other,’ and to therefore change the way we understand our world.” ―Sandy Tolan, author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East “In vivid, beautiful prose, Ibtisam Barakat transports readers into a place few Westerners have ever seen―the interior life of a young girl and her family in the occupied West Bank. Winner of the Arab American National Museum Book Award for Children's/YA Literature Transcending the particulars of politics, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood is an illuminating and timely book that provides a telling glimpse into a part of the Middle East that has become an increasingly important part of the puzzle of world peace. This is the beginning of her passionate connection to words, and as language becomes her refuge, allowing her to piece together the fragments of her world, it becomes her true home. With candor and courage, she stitches together memories of her childhood: fear and confusion as bombs explode near her home and she is separated from her family the harshness of life in the Middle East as a Palestinian refugee her unexpected joy when she discovers Alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. Just forget!'īut I do not want to do what Mother says. 'When a war ends it does not go away,' my mother says.'It hides inside us.

Tasting the sky a palestinian childhood