It’s every parent’s worst nightmare when Abed Salama gets word that his five-year-old son’s school bus has collided with a semi-trailer. He rushes to the site but the scene is chaos, with children taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified.
In his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall relays the story of a father’s desperate hunt to find his son, a task compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because of one fact: he is Palestinian. On the wrong side of the separation wall, Abed holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.
Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His essays, reviews, and reported features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian The New York Review of Books, and have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
