A Spring That Did Not Blossom: Palestinian Short Stories

by Nejmeh Khalil Habib, Samar Habib (translator)

Genres: Short Stories, Anthologies, Literary Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

149 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 2024

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Spring That Did Not Blossom is a breathtaking book.

Set during the late seventies and early eighties during the Lebanese Civil War, the interconnected stories focus on Palestinian refugees. The stories focus on regular people simply trying to live their lives amidst earthshattering traumas, moving from the small and quiet moments of getting treats for a child and worrying about pleasing your parents to massacres and sieges and martyrdom. The characters are connected by place and often by relation. The first story, "Mariam," was my favourite by far and really exemplifies all of the strongest points of the collection (it's also the longest in the collection by far). Seeing two parents dote on their only child as refugees is heartrending, and in an active war zone you know it can only lead to more traumas and sadness, but you can't help but hope for the best. The story "Kawkab," about Mariam's sister, was also a favourite. The passages where she reads her daughter's journal entries made my heart ache.

The prose / translation is incredibly beautiful and poetic, while also giving you absolutely no more than you need to know about the stories, which is always wonderful from a short story collection. I deeply appreciated that the translator included notes at many points throughout the story to add context for readers like myself who may not have all the details about the people, places, and events being referred to.

Highly recommend this one. This is an absolute gem, and I'm grateful for my local library including it in a display so that I could find it.

[Michael Gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure how I'm the first person to review this book on Goodreads, but here goes.

Heartbreaking. Though originally published in 2003, describing events from the 1980s, and only recently translated into English, these stories are a window into devastating massacres and the unimaginable strife of Palestinian families forced to navigate life, death, and resistance in camps and under occupation in ways that are unfortunately just as relevant today.

Habib crafts intimate portraits that highlight the reality and actuality of the human experiences that news coverage and unconscionable magnitudes of death so often erase. "There is nothing harder on a mother in all the world than to see her children hungry. I would have fed them my flesh if I could." (62)

I had often been told that the Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated, but at its core, and as Habib explores in these stories, it is fundamentally a human struggle for dignity against colonial violence and displacement. With Gaza under siege and Palestinian suffering continuing decades after the events depicted in these stories, A Spring That Did Not Blossom serves as both a historical document and a painful reminder of how long this struggle has been going on. They’re not stories from a distant past, but echoes that continue to reverberate today. Free Palestine.

[Billy Marino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rated a 3.75 on Fable

Many of the passages and stories here are quite powerful. I struggled a bit with the format, in that I sometimes found it hard to feel fully pulled into the emotional depth of the stories because of the jumping around between moments within any given story. My favorite portion of the book by far was in Kawkab's chapter as she finds and reads her daughter Randa's diary entries. Yes, it similarly jumped around between dates, but also somehow felt like the most obviously cohesive throughline to follow around Forgiveness, vengeance, and generally the emotional impacts on one child. Overall, the thing I loved most about this little mosaic of a collection of interconnected stories was the focus on the impacts of the Lebanese Civil War on the daily life of Palestinians there. The juxtaposition of daily and typical life events with the violence and tragedy of wars is reason enough to pick this up and give it a read.

[Sara Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting. Enlightening. This unfolding of stories that western media has largely ignored is an important read for those looking to better understand the lived experience of Palestinians throughout the last century. It's the kind of book that stays with you. Little snippets of terrible reality like smoke drifting between tiny moments of familial love.

[Michael Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggled a bit with the translation. But it’s a must read