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YEAR OF THE LOCUST: A SOLDIER'S DIARY AND THE ERASURE OF PALESTINE''S OTTOMAN PAST Salim Tamari Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 (x + 214 pages, index, illustrations) $29.95 (cloth, e-book)
In Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past, Salim Tamari offers an engaging account of Jerusalem during World War I and the final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. With his description of the introduction of electricity and steady water supply, he reminds the reader that Ottoman Jerusalem was a modern city in every sense. At the same time, the city's failed struggle against swarms of locusts, its mass poverty, and the appearance there of a new class of beggars show the horrifying consequences of war in an urban space. But Year of the Locust is more than a micro-history of a besieged city at the turn of the century. Using the war diary of an Ottoman Palestinian soldier, the book provides a fresh look at the life of a modern Arab young man and the search for both personal and national identities. Tamari argues that "the power of wartime diaries lies in their exposure of the texture of daily life, long buried in the political rhetoric of nationalist discourse" (4). His own analysis of the diary certainly facilitates this exposure. However, it also raises questions about which historical actors can be labeled as "subaltern."
Year of the Locust revolves around the accounts of three men that Tamari terms "ordinary soldiers" of the Ottoman army: Private Ihsan Turjman (1893-1917), a Jerusalemite who served as a clerk in the Ottoman military headquarters in Jerusalem; Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh (1891-1973; better known as Aref al-Aref), also a Jerusalemite who graduated from the Ottoman military college and was sent as an officer to the Russian front where he was quickly captured and put in a POW camp; and Mehmet Fasih (d. 1964), a Turkish Ottoman infantryman from Mersin who fought on the Gallipoli and Palestine fronts (3). The book focuses on Turjman's diary, which was virtually unknown until recently and for which Tamari provides the first-ever English translation. The other two diaries are well known in Arabic, Turkish, and English and are used primarily for comparison with Turjman's diary.
Tamari's detective work...