The Courage to be Jewish and the Wife of an Arab Sheik is mainstream women's fiction, a diary-type novel, fictional biography that reveals the life, growth, and marriage of a woman and her family in an interfaith marriage between a Jewish girl from Coney Island and an Arab Sheik from the Syrian deserts and Saudi Arabia.
What's a nice Brooklyn Jewish girl with a fiddle doing married to an Arab Sheik? Playing the G-string. Comparing Mizrahi music to Klezmer and Taksim to Magham Seekah. Poetry found its mood here. At dawn I rose on October 25, 1963 to see the salmon slit that ripped the East. My eyes were weary, but the day had to begin. Above, a jet cracked the sky, leaving a feathery trail of scattering wisps of smoke. These clouds soon parted. And by the time the sun melted into the hot winds and it's streams radiated to push the thermometer up to 120 degrees, I had packed and unfolded the first flaps of tent to start the new day. Between ethnomusicology, anthropology, creative writing research and two toddlers riding camelback, I had my hands full.