My traditional society defined womanhood as poverty, but I have turned it into wealth. As a child I was jealous of the preference for boys, then the … - Dorit Rabinyan

The differences between me and an author like Etgar Keret, who has parents who survived the Holocaust, are obvious-but so are the similarities. In a way, we are both telling the stories of those who were silenced by Israeli hegemony. There was a conformity that said, 'Let bygones be bygones! We will create a new country! We want the children here to be proud and magnificent!' But this is not a fair game. And there is a great opportunity for literature here, to give voice to those silenced voices.

That spring evening, which was marked by the harsh sting of chopped red peppers, all over the housing estate, in all the flats around all the supper tables, the residents talked about Matti Azizyan. Her actions dwarfed the fathers and mothers and big brothers, made their voices crack with shock, and reduced their world to the dimensions of the backyard. (p135)

We are drugged with romantic novels and Turkish films and sayings like, 'Everything will be better when you're married', and we rush panic-stricken towards the wedding-canopy, out of hunger, almost as though it were a children's disease we cannot recover from until we take the marriage vow. We leave the 'We' of the family and move directly to the 'Us' of the couple, without any 'Me' in the middle. I think that on the way from 'We' to 'Us' there has to be a 'Me', otherwise you have no energy for living.