Upon careful review, the Editorial Board of the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series recommends The Apricot Tree by Pauline Kaldas for publication through Black Lawrence Press
About the Author
Pauline Kaldas immigrated from Egypt with her family at the age of eight. She returned to Egypt several times and lived there for three years while teaching at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of The Measure of Distance (novel), Looking Both Ways (essays), The Time Between Places (stories), Letters from Cairo (memoir), Egyptian Compass (poetry), and the textbook, Writing the Multicultural Experience. She also co-edited Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction and Beyond Memory: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction. She was awarded a fellowship in fiction from the Virginia Commission of the Arts and has been in residency at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, South Porch, Green Olive Arts in Morocco, and 360XQMX in Mexico. She is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hollins University.
Artist’s Statement
The Apricot Tree invites us into a collection of linked short stories that reveal the lives of immigrants from different countries who find themselves in the Arab neighborhood of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, NY. At the center is Busyana who arrives from Egypt at an older age and settles into a life within her new community. Her interactions with each person she encounters creates a transformation as they continue on their journey. One by one, each person tells their own story—Adnan, a Palestinian server at the local bakery who has recently arrived from Gaza; Dina, Busyana’s niece who struggles with her sense of identity; Masud, Busyana’s brother who remains in an unhappy marriage; Dominykas, a Lithuanian man who lost his wife; and Anhur, a young Chinese girl who searches for a sense of belonging. We live with these characters as they carry the weight of their lost homes and attempt to make a new life.
Excerpt
On the first day of June, Busyana stepped out into her small courtyard, knowing that the apricots had bloomed. The early sun was still shaded by clouds, and the heat had not settled into the asphalt of the New York city streets. Still in her bathrobe and slippers, she opened the door to this outdoor space that was intended to serve as an entrance to her basement apartment. In addition to the apricot tree that grew out of a giant pot, now exceeding her own height of five feet, she had placed a bench and a small table. The bench she had found discarded in front of someone’s apartment, its wooden slats faded and peeling. She had walked around it, let her hand run across the grain of the wood, and made her decision to take it.
…..
“but really you will sit here?” her brother asked.
“why not?” she answered.
“all the people walking can see you.”
“don’t you remember when we were children, we sat on the balcony and shouted to everyone in the street?”
“but that was in Egypt,” he said.
“and this is Bay Ridge, not so different. here, everyone keeps their homeland.”