Mohammad Ali Taha’s «A Rose to Hafeeza’s Eyes» and Other Stories

The Translator: Jamal Assadi is Senior Lecturer, Chair of the Department of English, and Coordinator of the Practicum at The College of Sakhnin for Teacher Education in Israel. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, Dr. Assadi is the author of Acting, Rhetoric and Interpretation in Selected Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow (2006), Practicum Guide (2006), and A Distant Drummer: Foreign Perspectives on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007).

«Every story in this book makes me shake my head fondly and smile. Always suspenseful and beautifully plotted, Mohammad Ali Taha’s tales are moving, funny, and wryly philosophical. Like real people, his yearning and often befuddled characters stumble, manage, and occasionally triumph in their lives. The lovely translations by Jamal Assadi, a native of Taha’s landscape, capture not only meaning but nuance and shifts in tone. For me, reading and thinking about these stories has been a hugely expansive experience. I suspect that other English-speaking readers will find in them, as I do, a world exotic in its details but familiar in its humanity.» (Martha Moody, Author of ‘Best Friends’ and ‘The Office of Desire’)