The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist
SynopsisPlot
This contemporary classic, the story of a Palestinian who becomes a citizen of Israel, combines fact and fantasy, tragedy and comedy. Saeed is the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale tells of aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty that typify the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candor, and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragicomic episodes, he is gradually transformed from a disaster-haunted, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian—no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness. The author’s own anger and sorrow at Palestine’s tragedy and his acquaintance with the absurdities of Israeli politics (he was once a member of Israel’s parliament himself) are here transmuted into satire both biting and funny.
Story
About this book
Saeed, a Palestinian who has become a citizen of Israel, works as an informer for the state. He is not especially brave, clever, or principled. His candor and gullibility lead him into one absurd situation after another, and his story moves between comedy and grief in quick succession. The novel follows his encounters with bureaucracy, suspicion, loyalty tests, and the everyday friction of living as an Arab inside Israel. Through a chain of tragicomic episodes, Saeed shifts slowly from a compliant collaborator into someone who begins, however clumsily, to assert a sense of identity and seek ordinary happiness.
Emile Habiby, who served as a member of the Israeli parliament, wrote from direct experience of the political contradictions he satirizes. The book mixes fact with fantasy and uses its foolish narrator to expose patterns of aggression, control, and resistance that straightforward realism might flatten. Habiby's tone is sharp but genuinely funny, grounding large political tensions in small personal disasters.
The novel was translated into Hebrew by Anton Shammas, and it received Israel's foremost prize for literature. A stage version drawn from the book was performed to wide acclaim across a decade, carrying Saeed's episodes from the page to a live audience over many seasons.
