I majored in Russian and Middle Eastern Studies in college, which at the time meant that I was a hapless student caught among the passionately divided politics of not one but two different university departments. It was the era when the Soviet Union had begun to crumble—the Berlin Wall would come down the year after I graduated. The Russian department was bitterly divided among the pro- and anti- Soviet camps, and I’m afraid the faculty expended much effort denouncing each other’s theories and sources that might have been better spent on the students. Likewise the Middle East looked very similar to what I’m seeing on CNN. Beruit was a mass of rubble after ten years of civil war in Lebanon. Thousands of dispossessed wandered the roads and it was hard to tell the difference between legitimate governments (in exile or otherwise) and terrorist organizations. In such a climate, most of the books written about the area were out of date almost before they came off the presses, and I found myself looking for “the real Russia” and “the real Middle East” in its fiction instead. Because what is a country without its people? And the best way to understand people is to listen to their stories. So below are some books that have helped me on my various literary journeys through a troubled land.

Mandrakes from the Holy Land
by Megged, Aaron

Mandrakes from the Holy Land is a rich historical story told in a series of diaries entries and letters. It follows a young woman named Beatrice Campbell-Bennett, who is fleeing a romance she rather fell into with Vanessa Stephen—one of the famous Bloomsbury group and Virginia Woolf’s sister. Beatrice has come to Palestine to paint the flowers of the Bible, but while she is traveling she becomes enamored of the land and people, and ultimately embroiled with an early Zionist and his younger sister. Tensions rise when Beatrice’s friendship with the Zionist comes into conflict with her friendship with her Arab guide. Beatrice gets lost among the simmering politics and her own religious obsessions Mandrakes is a great portrayal of pre-Israeli Palestine, and the seeds of the conflict that still haunts us.

A Woman in Jerusalem
by Yehoshua, Abraham B., Halkin, Hillel 

When an unknown woman is killed during a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, there is no family to inform or take on the task of burying and mourning her. Finally, a bakery employee comes forward to say she had worked as a cleaning woman at his business, but can say very little more about her. He is given the task of discovering the woman’s identity and reconstructing her life so she can have a proper burial. He reluctantly agrees, and as he delves into her life, he discovers depths and reserves of compassion within himself. It is a sad story, but one that identifies the power of love to heal even the most uncrossable of rifts.

Miramar
by Mahfouz, Naguib, Mahmoud, Fatma Moussa, El Kommos, Maged

This is one of Nobel Prize-winner Mahfouz’s earliest novels, and one of my favorites. It is set in Alexandria in the late 60’s, at a pension where the lives of several disparate people have intersected against all odds. As the owner of the pension, the Miramar, holds court among her guests and relates the building’s violent and tragic history, the her stories evoke the passions and obsessions of her listeners. It makes for a very tight and suspenseful story. The Miramar becomes a microcosm of the conflicts that rage in Egypt and the Arab world.