By: Dr. Mohammad Aleem ( Chief News Editor-ICN GROUP )
Tracing the day-to-day struggle and triumph of a Palestinian boy, Ichmad Hamid, who, later on, turns to be a Nobel Prize winner in Physics.
It has always been a great pleasure for me to read a good book, but so rarely it comes in hand.
I have just finished reading this book, The Almond Tree by Michelle Cohen Corasanti, which was published by Garnet, UK, in 2012, and now a bestseller worldwide. I am pretty glad about it that I could get this book directly from the esteemed author. Michelle lives in New York and she is a Jewish American.
This is a novel which runs around in three hundred fifty pages and it contains fifty eight chapters.
The book is all about the day-to-day struggle and triumph of a Palestinian boy, Ichmad Hamid, who later on turns to be a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. It looks like a fairy tale because if we look at the background of Ichmad, it seems a pretty unachievable task because he comes from a very poor background. But it also strengthens the long held conviction that if one struggles hard and learns to live in different circumstances keeping his or her aim high, he or she may succeed, no matter at what time and how it comes. For Ichmad, though it was hard even to dream for a good cloth to wear and go to school regularly because his father, Baba is imprisoned in a pen like security prison of Israel, perched in a barren and secluded desert for no any apparent reason.
The only fault of that man was that some rogues had hidden some arms and ammunitions in the courtyard of his house and he knew nothing about it, but Israeli soldiers succeed in finding out. It was also coincidently the birthday of Ichmad and the family was celebrating it quite modestly that night when that ignominious incident had taken place. They live in a one room shabby house which even that gets destroyed by the Israeli bulldozer when they come to know about the arms hidden there in front of their house. Ichmad luckily finds out who has hidden that ammunition.
He was with a militant group fighting to liberate his motherland from the barbaric shackle of Israelis, but he gets caught by the security forces and reveals all his activities including his act of hiding the arms near the house of Ichmad. When Ichmad confronts with him in the night when the family was happily celebrating his birthday, he threatens to shoot him and wipe out his entire family if dares to reveal about it to any, especially Israelis.
For Ichmad, it is a difficult situation to cope with. He is only twelve years old then. He gets caught in the web of violence. He fears both from the militant groups and the Israeli army.But finally his father and his whole family pay the price.
The Israeli rouge soldiers punish him brutally with total disregard of the human propriety and dignity. And even they raze their tent like house to the ground. Though once upon a time, his family was rich and they owned a big plot of fertile land on which they used to grow oranges, olive and other food crops suitable for that area.
The story is of a village which is perched near the border of Palestine and Israel. This village comes under jurisdiction of Israel and they leave not any chance unused to harass them and to make them feel like a slave and more than that, very pathetic. They live a wretched life. They have no freedom even to breathe freely. They can’t think of sending their students to school, but they have to turn to the fields and construction building sites and slaughterhouses to earn their livings.
The story begins with a sad note. Ichmad has a big family. Among his siblings, he is the eldest. He’s one of the sisters, Amal gets killed by an explosion of mine which was laid just nearby their home and the Israeli army was pretty aware about those dangers. But they would never pay heed to such things. For them, killing innocent and unarmed Palestinians was just like killing some flies. They would never seem to take these incidents as a human should take.
“The next part was like slow motion. Like someone threw her up in the air. Smoke and fire were under her and the smile flew away. The sound hits us really hard. And when I looked to where she was, she was gone. Just gone, I couldn’t hear anything.” (P, 5)
This is the gory scene which the family witness while seeing their eldest daughter going into flames and soon after that devastating blast, they find her dead and completely disfigured.The second deaths come in the house when the security forces come to take Ichmad’s father into their custody. They beat him badly in front of his family members and even don’t spare small children. And Ichmad’s second sister in line succumbs to their mindless violence.
After the incarceration of his father, Ichmad is forced to work at the building construction sites to earn a living. He now learns to live like a grown up man who could provide succor to his family. His younger brother, Abbas also goes to work with him because it was necessary for them to survive. There Abbas and Ichmad were treated not like a normal child, but of an outcast class and every type of ill treatment they get there.
On an ill-fated day, one thick headed Iraqi immigrant Jew tortures Abbas badly for not doing his work properly. He suffers deadly fractures and gets hospitalized. He becomes paralyzed. For many years, he lives in the hospital. This is another big problem for the impoverished family. That incident not only breaks the body of that crippled boy, but his soul and mind also. He later on turns hostile to Israel and leaves his village to join a militant organization at Gaza. He now constantly grudges against his enemy and tires to avenge all humiliation and disgust received at the hand of Israeli. But this situation makes Ichmad and his family more vulnerable and harassments increase.
Ichmad is saved from such inglorious situation by a prudent and wise teacher who teaches him at the school. Ichmad is quite an intelligent boy. Especially, in science, his minds just fly like a bird in the sky. He loves to calculate the even difficult calculations in a fraction of time. And his teacher encourages him to continue studying and don’t think leaving it in any way. ( To Be Continued….)
