This startlingly inventive novel following an American woman's first trip to the Middle East, Deena Helm's Our Cut of Salt is an unforgettable revenge drama with a supernatural twist. It is part of an emerging genre of fiction by writers reckoning with the history of their grandparents' lost Palestinian homelands by crafting intimate narratives of families and dreams ravaged by the mass displacement that occurred in 1948, now known as the Nakba (the Arabic word for catastrophe).
In the summer of 2002, in Chicago, Marina is a recent college graduate who lives with her mother, Haifa. It is the eve of her departure for her late grandmother Nuhad's ancestral home in present-day Israel. Once there, Marina hopes to find the "small stone house overlooking the Mediterranean Sea" where generations of her grandmother's family grew up breathing the salt air and which Nuhad was forced to flee during an attack by Israeli soldiers. The only things Nuhad carried with her were a heartbreaking secret she took to her grave and the name of her beloved city, Haifa, which she bestowed on her daughter.
Helm elegantly juxtaposes Nuhad's girlhood seaside adventures with the more recent narrative of Marina's arrival in Haifa, while the wounded spirit of Nuhad's stone house maintains a haunting, restless presence throughout the story. Once upon a time, generations of families and friends gathered there to celebrate Christmas, Easter, and Eid. Since the Nakba, however, it "drips saltwater from ceiling to floor in a never-ending cycle of remembrance" and "kills... those who live over the dead." Even "the street cats give the house a wide berth."
Salt functions in Helm's intriguing plot as both a healing power and a poison, revealing clues to Nuhad's past. Upon meeting Rania, her grandmother's childhood friend, Marina realizes just how much family history Nuhad concealed from her descendants. It makes her determined to uncover not only the missing pieces of her grandmother's life but also the mass graves of Nakba victims under a parking lot in Haifa. Marina's is an audacious plan to reclaim the past, to tame the tormented spirit of the house stolen in 1948. It's high time, she decides, to steal it back.
Fans of Hannah Lillith Assadi's Paradiso 17 and Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost will be captivated by Our Cut of Salt. As a debut effort, it is a significant achievement, deploying fabulism to dark, impressive effect to convey historical horrors that, as Helm asserts, are still repeating. --Shahina Piyarali
Shelf Talker: In this haunting revenge drama with a supernatural twist, a young American woman travels to the Middle East in search of her grandmother's ancestral home by the Mediterranean Sea.