Al-Tantouria, the novel written by Radwa Ashour and translated into Persian by Asma Khajeh Zadeh, is recently published by the Iranian publisher Shahrestan Adab.
Al-Tantouria, as the title suggests, tells the story of a Palestinian family living in al-Tantouria - a Palestinian Arab village on the seashore, 24 km south of Haifa town. who must emigrate from his country, following the attack of the Zionist occupiers.
Roqayah, the protagonist and heroine of this 642-pages book, is a mother who explains her story at the insistence of her son.
This novel is the story of the refuge, the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli aggression against Lebanon, as well as the suffering of forced migration, massacres and other terrible incidents that happened to the Palestinians after the Oslo Accords.
Considered as one of the most important works in Arab narrative literature about the events of 1948 in Palestine, Al-Tantouria gives the reader many details. A story of exile and disaster that occurred to the Palestinian nation, forcing them to leave their country, hoping to return one day to their homeland.
Radwa Ashour (1946-2014) was an Egyptian author, novelist, literary critic and university professor. Her works, translated into English, Spanish, Italian and Indonesian, have won literary prizes, including the annual Cairo International Book Fair, the first prize at the First Arab Women's Book Fair, and the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature, among others. Ashour is the mother of the poet Tamim al-Barghouti and the wife of Mourid Barghouti, a man of letters and the Palestinian poet. She died in November 2014 after months of persistent health problems in Cairo.
Asma Khajeh Zadeh was born in 1980 and lives in Qom. She began her work as a translator in religious fields and Arabic philosophy. She has published 20 books, including Nizar Qabbani's Political Poems.