‘Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge’ reveals complications that arise when you come from two worlds

'Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge' by Ezzedine Fishere.

“Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge” by Ezzedine C. Fishere follows the lives of multiple characters from Egypt to New York. They oscillate between a settled life and the vicissitudes of disquiet. The author, Ezzedine C. Fishere, teaches at Dartmouth College and has had a career as a writer, diplomat and academic. His novel, “Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge” was first published in 2011 in Arabic and shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It has been translated by John Peate, a teacher and journalist.
The story begins with a party where we meet Darwish, a university professor, and the party’s host. Against his better judgment, he has invited everyone to his home for his granddaughter Salma’s 21st birthday. Darwish is a regimented man, one who has worked hard for everything in life, and has little tolerance for those who do not see life as he does. He is also a complicated man who needs things done in a certain way, his way. His children have not satisfied him so he will “leave them to enjoy blissful ignorance and the comfort of failure” and his wife, when she was alive, “was all too painfully aware of his dwindling respect for her.”
Too smart for his own good, and too intelligent to stop for anyone as life rushes by, he takes a moment to pause and look back at his past and reflect on his accomplishments. He realizes that his hard work and intelligence may have forever prevented him from establishing any real relationships. The hundreds of books he keeps in his old age have mapped out his life more than human beings and he begins to understand that all too well when the end is in sight.
Next, we meet Youssef, Darwish’s son, who also cannot seem to find satisfaction in life. His emotionally complicated past establishes within him a broken person, but it is his job and the things he has witnessed at the UN that have shaped a dreary and confusing world for him. Unhappy within corporate America and without it, he hopes to write what he can and all the while continue to do so without angering his father.
Every chapter of Fishere’s book introduces the reader to a new character and new personality. Amira, his sister-in-law; Rabab, his daughter Leila’s friend; Daoud, Amira’s husband; Adnan, a relative; and Rami, his former student. Each character plays a role in Darwish’s life so that he feels compelled to invite them to Salma’s birthday, though each of them leads complicated lives that mirror the realities of life in this world.
One such character is Rami who had a fulfilling life until he realized that he was only satisfying himself on the surface and not deep within. Something has been missing for him, and he could not figure out what it was until things began to spiral out of control. The opportunities presented to him and which he accepted excitedly and graciously have now landed him in a position in which he feels stranded.
“It struck him that this was the very definition of loneliness: trying to explain something to your own daughter in a language that was not your own, knowing you would never be understood in your mother tongue.”
Fishere’s book is subtly haunting, each character revealing mistakes, convictions and events that have shaped their lives. As the book follows the characters around the globe, with love, heartache, desire and meaning, it also follows the characters in the crumbling of their personae, as people who live between two worlds, Cairo and New York, and who must navigate their lives.
Fishere, through his characters, reveals the complications that arise when one comes from two worlds which means that life is split. You live in two worlds in which you are understood and misunderstood equally; you learn to straddle two languages, two sensibilities, and two cultures. Some people embrace one culture over the other; some continue to see themselves as in both, and some begin to loathe a part of themselves, pitting one side of themselves against the other. Being from two places, while at the same time feeling as if you are from no place at all, is not only confusing but also exhausting.
As Rami’s daughter Sasha points out about immigrants, “They leave their country for a new life in another, then complain about being in exile.”
Fishere dives deep into the essence of human character without judgment; the faults and misgivings of his characters are as vibrantly revealed as their merits. It is an in-depth portrayal of human beings, neither good nor bad, neither fair nor unjust, but as themselves, portrayed in a world that is mostly unfair. His character’s stories build brilliantly and calmly until the climax and the storm. He writes as if his sentences are the steps to the crux of the story where the questions and answers encompass all possibilities and outcomes.
His characters are as real as we are; we can relate to them, as each illustrates characteristics we find not only in everyday life but within our own family circles. He shows that life is a series of gestures and events, of tolerating life and conveniences to the point of inconvenience, that life is not as random as we assume and that every event has consequence even if not directly connected.
Fishere allows the reader to see a book of characters that are not only aware, they embrace all perspectives, all ideologies and stereotypes, revealing themselves to the reader as old characters but with new perceptions. Their unique lives, their own voices and the stage that Fishere has set reaches the entire spectrum of thought and truth.
In the end, the best way to describe “Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge” is in the words of one of Fishere’s own characters, Marieke. “Do you know what first attracted me to you? You seemed aware of human tragedy, yet were still optimistic. Your sense of humor mixes this sharp sense of tragedy with a lust for life.”
— Manal Shakir is the author of “Magic Within,” published by Harper Collins India, and a freelance writer. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
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