I’m awed by the six years of comprehensive research that went into the composition of The Diamond Setter and equally impressed that Mr. Sakal could sensitize my imagination to the extended families, both Jewish and Arab, who struggled to both maintain connections and break them, who struggled to hold onto love, memories and homes and to lose them, in the Middle East of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon throughout the 20th century and after it.
My connection to the region is quite tenuous. My father, as a teenager, lived in the Greek colony of Alexandria in the 1920’s. He spoke both Arabic and Greek, as well as English. But he is gone, and all that sensibility, memory and experience is lost. He never talked much about it, except that I know he had a rough time.
I am doubly grateful that having lost that family history, I can see what Moshe Sakal has preserved, and as a reader, can share in the family histories that are woven like streaks of brilliant color through silk, on the pages of his carefully laid-out story.
Here’s something I haven’t seen before: The novel is approximately bookmarked by two triangles. The first involves a Jewish couple and a young Arab woman. The latter is a relationship comprising three guys, two Israeli and one Arab. Where the first triangle seems tragic, where a Jewish wife is torn apart by her husband’s love for a young Arab woman and her own love for the same woman, the latter triangle between the three young men seems brighter, as if the book is attempting to limp uncertainly towards hope.
Tracing the history of an ill-starred diamond helps structure this intricate tale, as does frequent invocations of the Tale of One Thousand Nights and A Night in the classic Richard Burton translation. The architecture of the novel bears some resemblance to the 1,001 Nights in its procession of story after story in a dizzying and pleasantly distracting complexity of family ties and ties between Jews and Arabs.
Mr. Sakal plays leapfrog with generations of family members, touching on different family units in turn in quantum leaps of time frames so that you are never sure where you are in the story. New developments alter the story line as flashbacks almost as rapidly revise it. Moshe Sakal is a showoff but if you’re this good a writer why not? This is a soul-filled book of considerable intellectual depth. No, don’t be scared, it’s an absolutely great story.
