Profile Clippings

Critics sing praises for local first time author
Fear is no match for her passion
Malka Marom has emerged from the desert
Now she's Malka Marom -- author
A book for Japanese fishermen
Washington Fair Book Club Lecture Excerpts

Critics sing praises for local first time author
by Sherri Platt

Most people wish to have one successful career in their life - Malka Marom is in the midst of her third.

The singer turned documentarian turned author is promoting Sulha released in Canada last fall. This month it will be released in German and later in the year in Greek.

While Marom says there is no secret to her success, the passion she feels for her work is evidently a driving force. Her face lights up equally when talking about any of her endeavours.

While her different pursuits may sound like they are unrelated they are all linked by one common thread - her pioneering spirit.

As a singer of Israeli and world music she is now referred to as one of the founders of multiculturalism in Toronto. She teamed up with Joso Spralja in the first of the Yorkville coffee houses in the 60s, she opened the ears of the city to many new sounds.

"It was at a time where people where ashamed to be foreign - anything but a Wasp," remembers Marom. The pair sang together for four and a half years, producing four albums. Later Marom sang on her own for ten years. Through singing she made appearances around the world including representing Canada at a royal Command Performance at the Canadian Centennial Ball, performing with Johnny Carson and making several television appearances.

EMI recently released a digitally remastered edition of 20 of their songs with the CD Malka and Joso Forever: A Retrospective .

Even more than thirty years after she was a part of Malka and Joso she speaks of the time passionately.

There came a time however, where Marom's lifestyle was no longer compatible with the demands of touring, so she looked to another way to communicate with the world. Her curiosity lead her to the CBC, thinking that interviewing is something she would be interested in. At first she was told she should be singing, not working for them. She persevered, however, and soon after was interviewing famous individuals on camera, including Charlie Pride, and Moshe Dayan.

She then turned to radio documentaries, however, where she could explore subjects on a more personal level and she began producing award winning documentaries. She dealt with intimate subjects in The Holocaust, The Bedouins and Bite of The Big Apple .

Her documentaries took her to ground-breaking subjects and her novel is a first in its own right. It is the first book to be written by an Israeli "drop out" which deals with the issues the country faces.

Marom, born in Israel, moved to Toronto with her Canadian husband in the 50's. She now spends half of the year in her Village area home and half in Israel where her two sons live.

The novel is a sweeping look at an Israeli war-widow living in Canada. Faced with the question of her own love or the love of her country, she travels to the Sinai desert, the spot where her husband's army jet had been shot down to look for answers and inner peace. The seeds of the novel were planted when she herself went to spend a few months in the desert, where she lived with several different Bedouin tribes.

"I didn't really know why I was taking note and recording cassettes," says Marom who hadn't at that point planned to write Sulha . "They [the Bedouins] have a custom of opening their hearts and revealing their secrets only through parables, legends, poems and stories. They inspired my to seek out my own parables, legends, stories and secrets and to grapple with issues."

"Sulha" is one of the few words which means peace or reconciliation in both Hebrew and Arabic. While she does speak of the peace between nations in the book, to Marom it is also about finding your own peace and finding peace between people, family and friends.

"It is not only about the consequences of history but the possibility of transcending them." says Marom

"It was like love at first sight or conception at first try - before you know what it takes to raise a kid - to write a book." The labour of love definitely paid off. Over more than 10 years she nurtured the characters and the story, much like her own child.

"My husband wanted to declare them as dependents." she laughs.

There is no doubt in talking to Marom that the effort it took to pen Sulha was rewarding. Like a mother would guard a child, she shied away from discussing the book. When asked what the book was about her standard answer was "560 pages".

I didn't mean to be funny or opaque, but the writing comes form such a deep and mysterious place," she says.

Marom, already at work on her next novel, is closely guarding its theme and subject. Although her busy promotional tour has her booked until December, she will take some time off to relax this summer. She still sings on occasion including for the launch of Sulha .

"I love singing", says Marom. "I hope I sing in my novel."

"I grew up with the spirit of pioneering, of not fearing the unknown, of daring. It sounds like such a cliché but I dared to follow my interests."

That kind of daring has pushed Marom down many artistic roads and left success in her wake. As a child, she found media fame. In her 20s she was part of the sensational Canadian folk singing duo, Malka & Joso. Their dramatic good looks and artful arrangements landed them a national TV show, made them international stars, and produced such a following that now, after 35 years, EMI is releasing a collection of the best of their albums.

In her 30s, Marom won acclaim for the CBC radio documentaries she wrote and produced. And now, true to character, Marom has changed directions yet again: She is the 50-something author of Sulha , a novel that has already received literary acclaim because of its unusual subject matter and distinct voice.

Sulha is about expatriate Israeli Leora who returns to "The Land" from her adopted country Canada. She is searching for an answer to give to her son who wants permission to become a fighter pilot there: in "The Land" where Leora's husband died, as a pilot defending his country. Leora's search takes her to the forbidden domain of the Bedouin women of Sinai. There, in their world of oppressively hot desert days and bone-chilling nights, in their hand-woven tents shared with woman, beast and insect, Leora discovers that exile is a state of mind as much as it is a political label.

The strength of the book lies in its descriptions of desert life. So evocative are they that the reader can almost feel the unrelenting wind whipping through the stark landscape, can taste the grit of sand in one's mouth, can feel the itch of too many insect bites. Marom's picture of life in the desert resonates so powerfully because it is like seeing the desert through a lens; a lens that has captured the way it really is in the Sinai. Marom spent many long months living with five different desert clans at different times throughout the 10 years of research that went into the writing of her novel.

"The desert is a very purifying place," she says. "Maybe because really it's a place where life and death are so tightly bound, like flint stones almost; when you strike one against the other, they spark fire, inspiration, not only for the ingenious ways to survive or the prophetic poetry but for the full power of life.

"What's so wonderful about the Sinai [desert] more than the Negev even and the Judean is that it dwarfs the living and the dead and then it puts everything into perspective. It gives you the illusion that nothing ever changes. That there is an Almighty, maybe. There is a sense of new beginning. I think there is no coincidence that the [Israelites'] journey from slavery to freedom took place in the desert: and that's the best part of it and the worst part of it."

After months of living with the Badawia, Marom would return to her Toronto home in a state of shock; culture shock, and it was severe. Her furniture was more alien to her than familiar. She couldn't adjust and took to living by her fireplace. That's also where she started writing Sulha . And as she wrote it, she pictured a Japanese fisherman in her mind's eye - someone who hadn't a clue about the Middle East and its complicated politics, someone who had never heard of Israel or the Bedouins and knew nothing of the desert.

"I could just tell him the story like it happened on the moon; out of the context of time and place and politics that keeps changing from minute to minute," she says.

One of the things Marom is most proud of in this, her very first novel, is that it maintains political neutrality even while it presents all the arguments.

"I tried to show all the sides," she says. "It's like a kaleidoscope. Just when you think you know it, I turn it around because I believe that really, in the Middle East, it's so complex and has been so complex for such a long time, for thousands of years, I think it's rather arrogant to say, 'Oh well, I know it is like this or like that'. Politics changes so quickly in the Middle East.

It's not surprising that is you ask Marom to personally offer an opinion about Israeli politics and the breaking down of the peace process, she will decline.

"I'm a poet, not a politician. I think peace is always better than war. That's all I can offer."

"Look, if you rule over your friend, do you think it's good for your friendship? The solution is sulha, really; reconciliation."

"I think in the Middle East there is room for peace. I mean, I hope. I like to think so. Tomorrow I don't know what I'll think. This is the honest truth."

And she doesn't offer very much about her personal life, either, except to say that she came to Canada at 17 newly married to a Canadian, was a mother at 19, remarried a Canadian who has been her spouse for 30 years, has two sons, and lives half the year in Canada and the other half in Israel.

"I like to keep my personal life very private," she says. "I've been in the limelight for so many years but I've always managed to keep my personal life personal. It is fertile land and because I haven't really talked about it publicly, I can really mine it."

How much of her personal life has she mined for Sulha ? Like Leora, Marom grew up in Kfar Sabba. She, too, could look across at Qalqiliya, an Arab town not particularly partial to Israelis. And, like Leora, Marom was an outcast, despised by her fellow Israelis for having left the country. She says she understands bereavement and loss only too well.

"I think any person who grows up in a war-torn country, even if they didn't lose anybody, they lost a part of themselves and in this case, it's easier to understand a war widow because you can really understand her bereavement easier than if I were to tell you I lost my childhood. It's easier to explain it that way.

"Sulha gives voice not only to a dropout who's been virtually gagged for 20 years but to Bedouin women whose way of life kept them not only veiled, but voiceless for centuries. And I hope it give voice to all the people who are voiceless, not only in the Middle East, but here, too. There are people who are voiceless even today for reasons of country, of an inner censor, fear. Especially women."

It's almost like my karma to give voice."

Marom is not kidding. In 1963, she met Joso Spralja in a Toronto coffee-house in Yorkville. He was the transplanted son of a Dalmatian coast fisherman and barely spoke a word of English. Yet Marom and Spralja were able to communicate thought the one language the both shared - music. Malka & Joso were born. They gained a steady international following for their refreshingly new interpretations of authentic folksongs from all over the world. Through Malka & Joso, Malka Marom gave voice to "the ethnic".

"I didn't know that I would change the perceptions of the ethnic, the immigrant." she says. "People really looked down on immigrants."

So how does one describe Malka Marom? It's kind of hard to pigeonhole her. Just when you think you've got her pegged, she goes on to something new. Her life has never been static. Her passion to create has driven her to keep reinventing herself. She's now working on her second novel but who knows where her wanderlust will take her next.

"I'm just very curious. 'Where will that lead to? Let me just go around this curve'. Once you set the pattern - that 'I can try this and I can try that' and 'Let me try it and if I bomb, what the hell; I am entitled to bomb once, you know' - it gives you tremendous liberty.

"But I really cannot take any credit for setting out to do this because I didn't say, 'Oh now, well, let me be a write' [or a singer, etc.]. I said, 'Oh my God, why can't I stick to this one thing?

"There is something that I find common in almost everything that I did - an exquisite tension that is created by two opposing poles; the striving to attain the mythic dream of the New World - the pursuit of personal happiness and peace - and the longing for the mythic innocence of the Old Country. I think this informs almost everything I've done - this tension, this pull. I think it also dictates the way I dress, the way I talk, everything.

"Israel is a work in progress. That is what I call my life."

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Fear is no match for her passion
by Kinneret Globerman

Most of us tend to run from our fears. Or be incapacitated by them. Not Malka Marom. She has spent a lifetime embracing them.

"Wherever I was scared to go, that's where I went," says the Israeli-born actor, singer, documentary-maker and writer who has made Canada her home for about 40 years.

"Sometimes I look at my friends who are not so driven and I say, 'Ahhh, I wish I could really just relax.' This desire, this curiosity inspires me to try something: I'm driven to create to drive the fear away."

Fear has kept Ms. Marom busy creating for most of her life. As a child in Israel, she found fame on the big screen. In her 20s, she switched to singing. Her sultry voice and stunning beauty catapulted her to stardom as half of the hit Canadian fold-singing duo, Malka & Joso. Her four year stint with Joso in the 1960s won the pair an international following and their own TV show in Canada. Even today, 35 years later, EMI has released an anthology of their best songs.

By the time she was in her 30s, Ms. Marom was still winning accolades, only this time for the CBC radio documentaries she wrote and produced. And now, in her 50s, Malka Marom has plunged herself into something else entirely.

Her recently published novel, Sulha , is being celebrated as much for it's provocative subject matter as for its lyrical writing.

Sulha tells the story of Leora, an Israeli war widow who emigrates to Canada. Years later, she must decide whether to give her son permission to become a fighter pilot back in "The Land". She returns to Israel where she embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes her into the forbidden world of the Bedouin women of the Sinai desert. Much of Sulha 's power lies in its vivid descriptions of desert life. Living with the Badawia in their tents of woven goat hair, Leora suffers through the buzzing flies and the blowing sand in the merciless hot days and numbing cold desert nights.

Reading Ms. Marom's novel, you can taste the sand, smell the scorched and smoky firewood that permeates everything. It's evident she knows what she's writing about. For months, Ms. Marom lived with the Bedouin women in their tents.

"I learned that the desert is a place where good and bad are wedded like sun and shade, a place where a stranger is always received and always shut out, where the horizon is wide and the boundaries narrow, where the language is often silence or guns."

Leora's experiences as an outcast, vilified by her Israeli friends and family for leaving Israel, might as well have been Ms. Marom's. Forty years ago, Israelis who emigrated were considered traitors and that attitude hasn't changed much, she says, "For so many years, it was instilled in me that a 'dropout' has no right to utter anything that is derogatory about Israel, so I didn't really say anything for many, many years. And even when I started to write Sulha , it was a struggle over every word and every sentence."

The struggle lasted 10 years, resulting in a novel nearly 600 pages long. "Maybe it's so long because I had to be gagged for so many years and once I opened my mouth...boy!"

Why go to the desert and share the Bedouin's hardship? If you're Malka Marom, you do it because nobody else has done it. And you do it for the same reasons you've done everything else: a passionate desire to overcome your fears.

When Malka & Joso entered the musical scene in 1963, there weren't many other "ethnic" folksingers bold enough to sing about the immigrant experience. Malka & Joso's renditions of Russian, Brazilian, Israeli, Mexican, Spanish, and Italian songs made ethnicity fashionable. "It changed the perception of 'the ethnic' people who have a foreign accent, from the derogatory connotations to something that was elegant, wise; that was very sophisticated and avant-garde." she says.

Being ethnic was not easy. Ms. Marom was just 17 and newly married to a Canadian when she left Israel for a new life in her husband's homeland. She suffered severe culture shock and soon realized that the bluntness of Hebrew did not translate well into the civility of English.

"We don't say 'would have been, could have been.'" she says. "It's like 'pass me this,' not 'please, would you mind passing me the butter.' When I came here and I said, 'Excuse me, I have to go the toilet,' I was told 'Well, a lady doesn't say 'toilet', She says 'powder room'... It was this kind of Canada that I came to."

That culture shock was nothing compared to what she experienced decades later, returning to Canada following her time with the Bedouin. She couldn't adjust to chairs and took to living in front of her fireplace, cooking on it, sleeping by it.

"My family had a fit." she exclaims. "They thought I went completely mad! They were scared."

"I talked in a very quiet voice, the way you talk in the desert. Because the air carries sound so far, you talk in a whisper. Which is very alien to me: I have such a big voice."

It was during those days and nights by the fireplace in her Toronto home that she began to write Sulha . The crackling fire was her link to the desert.

It's hard to say how much of Leora is Malka Marom. She certainly won't tell. In fact, she refuses to divulge much about her private life except to say that she has two sons, that she was only married to her first husband for five years, and that she's been married to her second husband, also a Canadian, for 30 years. Period. What she will say is that, like Leora, she knows what it's like to suffer grief.

"I wrote what I know. I know bereavement. Like any child who has grown up in a war-torn country, you suffer loss. Your loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of friends, of relatives. I know what it's like to live near an Arabic town. You have neighbours who are enemies. I know the desire to have peace and forgiveness and reconciliation, not at the national level but personal. And the question arises: What price, personally, for individuals? Where does heroism begin and where does it end? How far may a person go -- too far -- in quest of redemption?

"The novel is called Sulha, which really means a forgiveness, a reconciliation, making whole in both Arabic and Hebrew. The theme of Sulha - it's not only reconciliation between Arabs and Jews or Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews, but it's really like a bridge between hope and anguish, between cultures old and new, men and women, you and me, really. Anybody outside of your own skin.

"I hope that the readers will learn from Sulha to explore not only the consequences of history but the possibilities of transcending them."

Sulha may also be an allegory for Ms. Marom's own life and her ability to always move beyond her past; her will to transcend being labelled. Just when she's honed a craft, she has moved on, rejecting complacency, impelled by her passion and her fear.

"I've never done just one thing. Usually, I've stayed for a bit in each place. I sang quiet a long time; I did a lot of documentaries, and now I'm in the midst of writing another novel. I grew up with the spirit of pioneering, of daring. I wonder if this really is why I was successful, because I was really passionate about what I did."

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Malka has emerged from the desert, and she is a study in charisma
by Trevor Klassen - FFWD Weekly

Malka Marom has emerged from the desert, and she is a study in charisma. She strides into her interview smiling with a naked ebullience, resplendent in a thowb ? long tribal dress ? knit for her by a Badawia, the Arab Bedouin women (the men are Badu) of the Sinai desert. Marom lived with them over two months a year for seven years. One of the Badawia likely gave her the elaborate pewter-coloured necklace which adorns her neck, and perhaps too the yellow headband about her temples. Her visitations with the nomadic Bedouins inspired her to write Sulha, her debut novel.

Marom was born and raised in Israel, but later moved to Canada. She became a folk singer (her partner was Joso) and radio documentarian. Her successful career received critical praise and even included a Royal Command Performance in London. I wondered what drove her to the ostensible punishment to compose Sulha, a 14-year labour of nearly 600 pages. Once I heard her speak, however, I understood quickly that it was less a punishment than a labour of mad love.

"I had to do it. It was a purging, a catharsis. The novel entirely absorbed me. I lost friends," she says in a thick Israeli accent, half joking and laughing heartily.

Marom uses a wealth of body language as she speaks, waving her arms about with such exuberance when making a salient point that I fear for the life of my mini-recorder, balanced precariously near the table?s edge. Her voice is strong, throaty, its volume of sundry levels dropping and rising in accordance to her excitement.

She is firing on all cylinders. The nearly universal praise of Sulha is reflected in Marom?s sparkling and surprised eyes. Her unpreparedness for the critical enthusiasm complements the uncontrived passages of Sulha.

"Very little was deliberately constructed. I knew the story, but I wrote much of it on a very subconscious level. It was an obsession ? it became my life. I studied Arabic to speak with the Bedouins," she says.

"The book was me ? it was written from a place deep inside that I could not articulate. I cannot do it even now. It was as though I was pregnant and had to give birth. And no more than you can choose what kind of child you?re going to have could I choose what kind of book I was going to write. It surprised me, really."

I ask what she did, when she was not writing and researching, to unwind. It?s an idle question because she insists the book took over everything ? not a meal went by that it wasn?t the main topic of conversation, nary a moment was spent focusing upon anything else. She is planning another novel, and says this one will be entirely different.

"It will hopefully be shorter and have only two characters ? a man," she pauses for effect, "and a woman." She offers a Machiavellian look and both of us erupt in laughter. "More than that I cannot tell," she says with a wry smile.

She is tremendously busy. Her recording company, EMI, is re-releasing her folk songs. She finds it difficult to balance promotion with writing. "I have to be totally immersed to write. I can walk and chew gum, but I can?t write and promote."

These pulling responsibilities are in a mild sense representative of sulha, which is one of the few words that means the same in Hebrew and Arabic: "a forgiveness; a reconciliation; a joining, repairing, making whole that which has been torn asunder ? peace."

Marom?s view on sulha is realistic. "Reconciliation is not all peace and love. It is learning to live with conflict, and all of us to a certain degree must do it."

Now she's Malka Marom -- author
by Sid Adilman - Toronto Star

Another popular Toronto folksinger of the 1960s is back in the national spotlight. Malka of the folksong duo, Malka & Joso, which broke up in 1967 after 4 1/2 years together, will have her first novel in bookstores this month.

It's title Sulha, which means forgiveness in both Hebrew and Arabic, and it's being published by Key Porter.

And by a coincidence of timing, EMI-Capitol Canada will reissue Malka and Joso's three albums in a single CD package this fall as part of the company's 50th anniversary celebrations.

It took Malka 14 years to write the multi-layered Sulha, a process that began in 1985, after nearly three years of researching the subject.

The main character, the narrator of the novel, is an Israeli woman who was widowed when her pilot husband was killed in the Six Day War, leaving her with an infant son. She marries a Canadian and moves to Toronto, unable for 20 years to emotionally confront the loss of both her first husband and her home country.

Her son, now 20 and still an Israeli citizen, is called to serve in its army and he wants to go back and be pilot like his father.

But Israeli law forbids an only child from high risk war duty unless his birth parents - in Sulha's case, his mother - give written consent.

Trying to decide what to do, the mother travels back to Israel for the first time since moving to Canada and she also visits Bedouin villages in the desert to try to understand the Arab view of the Middle East conflict.

Sulha also tracks another journey - that of the mother's immigration to Canada, where, like many immigrants, she is patronized and not always made welcome.

Malka has now begun writing another novel, "But I've learned my lesson. It's going to be short. It's not going to take as long as Sulha did."

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A book for Japanese fishermen
by Pearl Sheffy Gefen - Toronto Star

Malka Marom wrote her just published first novel Sulha for "readers who don't know about the Middle East and couldn't care less. I felt a tremendous need to impart what I had learned."

So Marom left her comfortable Toronto home to live for months with nomads in the Sinai desert, sleeping in squalid, lice-infested tents, defecating in ditches, and losing 40lbs in the process.

The former folk-singer and documentary maker, born in Israel but living mostly in Canada (once of the popular Canadian duo "Malka and Yoso"), sought the experience to write Sulha , but she still doesn't know quiet why. "Maybe it's the longing for roots. The Beduin live like my Israelite ancestors did when they fled Egypt and spent 40 years in the desert."

The book has received good reviews in Canada, and has been selling well. One reviewer called the 560 page book the "surprise hit of the literary season."

"The Beduin accepted me as a 'stranger-no-stranger' with great respect and affection," Marom says. "They called me Malika, which means queen. They believe they're of noble blood and lineage, so the Beduin man has self-esteem, he's built to be the protector, the voice and face of his people. The women are veiled, and can be divorced by their husbands merely repeating 'I divorce you' three times (and he gets to keep the kids). but they are proud because they give birth to noble men and women."

Marom is chatting beside the fireplace in the Toronto home where she brewed tea the Beduin way as she wrote her first pages (which won her an Ontario Arts Council award for the most promising work of fiction in progress), surrounded by an eclectic mix of art works from east and west: Iroquois masks, Beduin sculptures, Eskimo and Egyptian carvings, Canadian, Israeli, French and Spanish paintings. And a piano.

She's wearing a handsome Beduin gown, embroidered on hand-woven cloth. "When I'm with the Beduin, I wear jeans, in Toronto I wear Bedouin dress," she shrugs. "I'm always the outsider everywhere. Only in Israel do I wear normal clothes." She laughs, a deep, rich laugh.

Sulha is passionate, poetic and never preachy, exotic and contemporary, ancient and today's news. It tells of Leora, an Israeli war widow living in Canada, whose husband was killed in the 1956 Sinai war. Most of the long novel is set in the Sinai when Israel is about to return it to Egypt, as Leora seeks the spot where her husband's plane was shot down.

Rare in the avalanche of books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, most of which take a stand, Sulha gives every side its say in the infinitely complex situation. "I refused to make it simple. Life is not simple, love is not simple, nor is forgiveness, reconciliation and peace, especially in the Middle East. To just present one aspect is irresponsible." Israelis debate hotly, the Sinai Beduin weigh the merits and demerits of Israeli and Egyptian rule, the Israeli Beduin argue about Israel's attempt to urbanize them, to stop their goats from gobbling up the crops planted with much sweat and little water in the Negev desert - and to provide space in tiny Israel for army training after they leave the Sinai.

The book, published by Key Porter, won advance endorsements from artists as disparate as Leonard Cohen ("crucial human questions, passionately addressed"), Joni Mitchell ("a multi-cultural adventure... told in a unique new voice") and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel ("one of the most poignant and inspired novels to have emerged from modern Israel's harrowing yet exultant experience"). Germany has already bought the rights for all German-speaking countries.

The word sulha means forgiveness and reconciliation in both Arabic and Hebrew. The book reflects many kinds of sulha : between a dovish intellectual Israeli father and his hawkish, pro-settlement son, between Leora's parents and the deity who did nothing to prevent the Holocaust, between Beduin clans involved in a blood feud over a breach of female chastity.

Sinai Beduin, always politically neutral, are canny interpreters of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the novel, clan elders meet amid the desert's majestic mountains to discuss the bride-price a groom's family must pay for his bride. It's a choice between ceding rights to their water holes or to their secret smugglers, so these routes are useless if Israel stays in Sinai. Egyptians don't bother.

On the other hand, Israel supplies schools, clinics and water tanks, and the Egyptians don't. The Beduin leaders vote to keep their water rights because they think Israel will lose in the long run: "Egypt values land more than honor, and Israel values life more than land." The Israelis, one Beduin elder growls, "do not know their enemy. That is their biggest failing. 'Aywa,' had the Arab 'fellahin' conquered Israel in six days, they would have slaughtered every Yahodi...and stuffed his belly with sand." Israel is not ruthless enough: "For the Yahud did not kill the children of the Arabs who killed their children in Ma'alot" [where a school was brutally attacked by terrorists]... Spare your enemy and he will wait, gather strength to attack you again - even a woman knows that." An Israeli says "the minute they [the Arabs] see us as vulnerable or weak, they'll pounce.. But who can hang tough forever? who wants to hang tough forever?"

Marom's fascination with the Beduin began with a CBC radio documentary, The Bedouins , which won the Ohio State Award. She studied Arabic, bought a jeep, outfitted it with everything needed for desert survival, and hired a guide to introduce her to the Beduin, "which he wouldn't do until I have him three characted references to prove I was reliable, because he respected the Beduin."

The book's language, in the Beduin passages, is lyrical: "I heard it as music." But it's often punctured by discordant swear words spoken by Leora "because I didn't want it to be only a romantic vision. I wanted to bring in the scepticism and irony of modern life." Born and raised in Israel, Marom has been married to a Canadian for 30 years. In the 60's and 70s, first with Yoso and then on her own, she sang folk songs from 40 countries in 14 languages on the world's stages, radio and TV. She sand at a Royal Command Performance in London in 1967, and appeared on the Johnny Carson show.

"Many people came to me and said, 'You make me feel so proud to be Greek, or Italian, or Jewish.' We made it fashionable to be ethnic." (Malka and Yoso recordings on Capital EMI label will be re-released this year.) Then it was time to move on. She told a friend at CBC that "I'd like to try my hand at interviewing, and he said no, he didn't want to waste my singing talent. I told him, 'Don't play God'. He made me start from scratch as a gofer, thinking I'd be discouraged, but I didn't mind at all. I was learning." She went on to make numerous radio documentaries.

Marom, now writing a new novel set in Canada, says Sulha is "about knowing. I hear people say, 'Oh, the Middle East, I know everything about it.' But do you? does anyone? I think of readers who don't care about the Middle East. My nephew is married to a Japanese girl, and she told me her mother had known nothing about Israel, so I thought I must write the book partly for, say, a fisherman in the most remote part of Japan who never heard about Israel."

She is disturbed by verified reports that schools run by the Palestinian Authority use blatantly anti-Israeli textbooks. But "if there is no war, I am happy: to me, that's peace, even if the next generation might attack Israel again. I hope that if they have a good life and their own identity and independence, there will not be a need for bloodshed, because they will have more to lose."

Marom's parents and two sons live in Israel. She visits often, and says she's constantly torn, like Leora in the book, between the two countries. "I love Canada, but miss the sense of tribe, the belonging, the language I spoke as a child, my family and friends."

Sulha is probably the first novel about Israel written by a yoredet. "Exile from Israel is a form of suicide," she says, " and Israeli yordim are not your usual immigrants. We are sitting on a suitcase with one leg in Canada and the other in Israel."

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Washington Fair Book Club Lecture Excerpts

When Estelle asked me last June to return to your club this Fall to review Sulha, I had no idea how ironic the book choice would come to be. Israel was in relative calm at the time. There was no sense of the impending conflict and in reading the book, a sulha seemed almost possible. What has happened in Israel and even in Ottawa since has dashed all hope of reconciliation; in the immediate future, at any rate. The world events in the past month have contributed to making Sulha an even more compelling read and certainly, a relevant one.

Sulha is really quite a book, for many reasons. It?s subject matter is unusual, even though its theme is a popular one; the search for self. Its writing is very lyrical, at times. Its subject matter is exotic. Its plot and sub-plots aren?t run-of-the-mill. It?s quite an achievement for a first-time novelist.

 (abbreviated version of synopsis):   SULHA  is about Leora, an Israeli widowed when her husband, Arik?a fighter pilot?is shot down on manoeuvres during the Sinai war. She decides to leave Israel, her family and friends, and go to Canada with her baby boy, settling in Toronto. She marries a Canadian there and lives a conventional life, attending JNF parties, watching her son, Levi, grow into manhood.

Brought up by his Canadian step-father to honour his dead father as a hero, Leora?s son Levi is eager to join the Israeli army upon being called up for service. He wants to be a pilot and needs the permission of his mother.

 Leora goes  back to Israel to try to come to a decision, some 20 years after she?d left. She finds herself heading to the vast expanse of desert where her husband had last been sited, driven by a friend knowledgeable about the desert and its inhabitants. There, Leora and El Bofessa, as her friend is called, virtually stumble upon the Bedouin?s forbidden tents. The Bedouin women, the Badawia, invite Leora to return for a longer stay and she jumps at the chance. She still harbours the hope that after all these years, Arik is still alive.

 Leora returns to the Sinai, ?to reclaim the woman buried in the rubble of widowhood?. In flashbacks, we are told how she gets there, with the help of a kibbutznik who is also an army commander in the high-ranking Unit?the same unit of men who rescued the hostages at Entebbe.

In reminiscences about times and conversations past, we learn about the political climate of The Land, always in flux, family members and friends diametrically opposed. From idealistic kibbutzniks to war-weary and cynical urban dwellers, every Israeli has his and her say in this book. And through it all, as Malka Marom says herself, Leora discovers the heartbreak and the beauty in each person?s and each culture?s inherent contradictions. If Malka Marom had to sum it up in one sentence, she says, she?d describe SULHA as a story of a woman?s search for an answer to her son?s question, and a search for reconciliation of her own fragmented past. Sulha, in fact, means reconciliation, forgiveness; as Marom says in the introduction to the book, sulha has the same meaning in both Arabic and Hebrew: it?s a joining, a repairing, a making whole that which is torn asunder?peace.

(abbreviated bio.) SULHA is Malka Marom?s first novel and although she won?t say just how much of herself is in Leora, readers can be assured that the author?s own life has given much grist to the mill. Marom was born in Israel. She got her first taste of stardom as a child actress there. At 17, Marom met her first husband, a Canadian basketball athlete who had come to Israel for the Macabbee games. She married him, moved to Canada with him and became a mother at 19.

It was also a Canada that was only on the verge of multiculturalism. Which is why it?s quite amazing that Marom turned what could have been a liability into a calling card. In 1963, she met Joso Spralja, the son of a Dalmation coast fisherman, in Toronto?s Yorkville district. They met at an after-hours coffeehouse, the kind of club musicians would drop into, to sing and play on their own or jam with others. Marom, whose father was a cantor, had grown up with music, so when a musician friend invited her to go along with him to the coffee-house one night to do some jamming, she did. And as she sang some Hebrew and Yiddish songs, Joso?who was often at the club and happened to be there that fateful night?instinctively began to harmonize. The marvelous folk-singing duo Malka & Joso was born. They became an international success not only because of their exotic renditions of folksongs from all over the world, but also because of their mesmerizing stage presence. They were sultry and sexy and just plain captivating. And their music made ethnicity fashionable.

In the 4 ½  years that they were together, Malka & Joso managed to rise to international stardom, garnering rave reviews wherever they went. They performed at the Mariposa Folk Festival in 1964, gave concerts at Carnegie Hall, were favourites of Johnny Carson.

And then came her third incarnation. Again, it had to do with performing?in a manner of speaking?for specialized audiences: She took to doing radio documentaries for CBC. And she went to the desert for material. She knew no Arabic at the time and a guide would translate. Following that first trip, she was so inspired that once back in Toronto, Marom hired a tutor and studied Arabic for three months before returning to the desert. She even asked herself what the rush was for, why was she taking so many notes and recording the Bedouin songs and legends sung and told to her for weeks and months on end. Because Marom subsequently stayed with five different clans in different parts of the Sinai desert.

>From her desert experiences came the award-winning documentaries The Bedouins, and Desert Diaries. [She also made an 8-hour documentary on the American Dream entitled A Bite of the Big Apple, and two other award winners: My Jerusalem and The Holocaust.] And from her desert experiences came SULHA, a book that took Marom ten years to write.

?I?ve been told that it is one of the big achievements in SULHA that it doesn?t pass judgement on anything, which is really rare in the Middle East. But I was extremely curious to know how they lived. Of course, I romanticized it as a child, all the forbidden stuff. And so when I had the opportunity to really go and be invited to Bedouin tents, I grabbed it to a degree that I really quit everything and went there. At one time, I stayed with them for five months and when I came home?talk about culture shock coming to Canada! When I came home from the Bedouin tents, I couldn?t adjust to chairs. I lived in front of the fireplace in my home. My family had a fit! They thought, that?s it! I had gone bananas! I?d gone completely mad! They were scared. I talked in a very quiet voice, the way you talk in the desert. Because the air carries sound so far, you talk in a whisper. Which is very alien to me, I have such a big voice. I talked in a whisper and I stayed near the fireplace and I?d sit by the fireplace. I?d make coffee, I?d cook on the fire. I slept by the fire and I started to write SULHA by the fire.?

(excerpts from rest of lecture:) It is Marom?s descriptions of the desert and the Badu?s existence that give Sulha its power.

 Sulha is about returning to one?s roots, to what is fundamental. Leora returns to the Sinai to?as she says??reclaim the woman buried in the rubble of widowhood?. To find herself, basically.

For a first novel, Sulha is a remarkable accomplishment. Remember, English is Malka Marom?s second language and yet she has written a book that is evocative, captivating in parts, lyrical in parts, like a desert ballad or a desert lament. Its strength lies in its description of Badawia life, through its three main Bedouin characters. The most enigmatic of them is Imsallam Suleman Abu Salim?master of the tents, commanding, regal, dignified, intimidating. How can you not be fascinated with this man? The other two main colourful characters are Abu Salim?s wives, the elder Azzizah, and the young girl-wife, Tammam.

Azzizah, whose name means ?joyful?, is the ever-cautious senior wife whose clothes, like her body, are faded and worn yet who carries herself as regally and sensuously as a youthful dancer. Tammam is the younger, beautiful girl-wife whose name means ?complete?, ?whole?. She is girlish and alluring and terribly troubled. ?Take what is left of my life and enjoy it? is her constant croon to her baby daughter, much to Leora?s distress. Although the elder and the younger women are co-wives, there appears to be no rivalry between them. In fact, Azzizah and Tammam seem to be allies, with a deep love and respect for each other. It is by living with them and observing them that Leora learns that the desert can be a harsh and unforgiving place to live, both from the elements and from Badu revenge.

SULHA?s lyricism makes me think of it as a desert ballad or a desert lament. It?s a lament for what happened to ?The Dream?.  The dream of Israel being a light unto the nations, Marom has said, has turned into the bitter reality of horrendous wars that continue to claim so many lives. It?s a lament for ex-patriot Israelis who feel the guilt of having left The Land and the disdain of Israelis back home. It?s a lament for the Badu way of life being subsumed by the lure of modernization.

Marom claims the reason the book is so long is that as a dropout?which is what Israelis are called if they leave The Land?she wasn?t allowed to voice her opinions on anything that had to do with the country of her birth:

?For so many years it was instilled in me that a dropout has no right to utter anything that is derogatory about Israel, that I really didn?t say anything for many, many years and even when I started to write Sulha, it was such a struggle over every word and sentence. In my opinion, it?s the first novel written by a dropout that features a dropout as a protagonist. Maybe it?s so long because I had to be gagged for so many years and once I opened my mouth?oh boy!?

This sense of being gagged, perhaps, is what kept Marom mute about her private life throughout the many years in the limelight, throughout her many successes. Marom has never revealed much about her personal life and, in fact, in interviewing her, it was difficult at times to get direct answers to some of the questions that I asked. She says she likes to keep her personal life private and because she hasn?t been vocal, she says she can really mine it.

Malka Marom is working on her next book. It will be interesting to see what she mines for us this time.