Novel
A Trumpet in the Wadi
חצוצרה בוואדי
Sami Michael · 1987
Synopsis
Haifa, the Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood, from October 1981 to the summer of 1982. Houda, an Arab Christian in her thirties, solitary, lives with her widowed mother, her grandfather Elias, an old Copt, and her younger sister Mary, beautiful, free and reckless, whom the family would like to marry off to a well-off cousin rather than to the landlord's good-for-nothing son. Upstairs a tenant moves in, Alex, a young Jewish immigrant from Russia who speaks barely any Hebrew, studies at the Technion, works nights at the port and plays the trumpet. Houda falls in love with him, with the blessing of her sister and her grandfather.
Context
The novel appeared from Am Oved in 1987, in 275 pages; in 2002, the house celebrated its twenty-ninth printing and more than a hundred thousand copies sold. Shmuel Hasfari adapted it for the Beit Lessin theatre as early as 1988, and it has been revived five times on Israeli stages; Slava and Lina Chaplin made a film from it, which won an award at the Haifa festival in 2001. The story is told from the point of view of a Christian Arab woman, who knows Amichai's poems by heart. It was translated into English in 2003, into French in 2006, and into several other languages.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages, translated into French. It helps to know that Wadi Nisnas is an Arab neighbourhood of Haifa.
Prizes and reception
Reprinted twenty-nine times in fifteen years; chosen by Am Oved among the six books of its sixty years; Italian WIZO prize.