Nathan Thrall, published in Italy by Neri Pezza, wins the PULITZER 2024 for NON-FICTION
Nathan Thrall’s book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama – Anatomy of a Tragedy in Jerusalem”, recently released by Neri Pozza, won the 2024 PULITZER PRIZE for NONFICTION with the following motivation:
“The passionate and timely story of life in the West Bank occupied by Israel, through the portrait of a Palestinian father who loses his five-year-old son in the terrifying accident of his school bus. An accident made even more terrible by safety regulations that delayed Israeli and Palestinian rescue efforts.”
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«I have never read pages like these on Israel and Palestine that reach such a depth of perception and understanding… There is the whole of modern Palestinian history within the memories of these people. Meeting their stories is an unexpected gift, much more useful than any reportage on Palestine.”
David Schulman, New York Review of Books
“The best pages on Palestine I have ever read” JM Coetzee
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A moving read and an original look at the Israel-Palestine conflict: Thrall manages in a truly surprising way to make people understand how the conflict is also the result of small daily abuses, of an obtusely ferocious bureaucracy, of the unwillingness to understand each other
Milad, five years old, is very excited: on his shoulders is a backpack bigger than him with his favorite snack inside, he can’t wait to get on the bus for the first class trip of his life, destination a park north of Jerusalem. When Milad says goodbye to her mother and goes out into the pouring rain, her father Abed is still sleeping. The day that will change Abed Salama’s life forever begins a few hours later, on a blocked road, one of the few on which Palestinians are still allowed to travel, and the news of an accident “with a high number of victims”. Pressed by an omen, Abed breathlessly reaches the site of impact where he is greeted by an infernal bedlam: a gigantic overturned truck, a school bus on fire, bodies on the ground. However, Milad cannot be found. Thus begins a distressing journey for Abed in a labyrinth of physical, bureaucratic and emotional obstacles, due to his condition as a Palestinian. And this Palestinian father is on the wrong side of the separation wall, his documents of the wrong color do not allow him to pass the military checkpoints, to enter Jerusalem, to know the fate of his son. Abed’s desperate search crosses the path of other people, with their stories all converging on that hell: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic, an Israeli officer and a Palestinian official, a paramedic settler, ultra-Orthodox health workers . Two mothers, who hope that the wounded but alive child is theirs. Reading this book – precise and warm, passionate and lucid – we do not find ourselves in a work of fiction in which the events and people mentioned are the fruit of the author’s imagination, but we plunge into the ferocious daily life of those who live in the most contested land of the planet and, despite being deprived of the most basic rights, tries to keep his humanity intact. We will emerge more acutely, and again, aware.
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Nathan Thrall is an expert journalist on the Middle East who lives in Jerusalem. For ten years he directed the Arab-Israeli Project within the International Crisis Group, the transnational NGO that advises governments and intergovernmental bodies on conflict prevention and resolution, and taught at Bard College. His writings appeared on The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Review of BooksAnd The New York Times Magazineand have been translated into multiple languages. He is also the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.
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