"The Belgian's Houses"

Ibiidi Publications in Cairo has announced the release of a new novel by Syrian-Belgian novelist and poet Hosheng Ossi, titled "The Belgian's Houses." The novel consists of 36 chapters spanning 363 medium-format pages.
The story begins in Belgium and ends in Palestine, specifically in the city of Jerusalem, passing through numerous cities along the way, including Antwerp, Paris, Genoa, Istanbul, Haifa, Hebron, Irbid, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, and Brussels.
The novel traces the lives of four generations from two families: the first is a Palestinian family from Jerusalem of Ayyubid (Kurdish) descent, while the second is a Belgian Jewish family. The latter is forced to flee Belgium for Palestine and settle in Jerusalem as a result of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Meanwhile, the Palestinian family is compelled to leave Jerusalem for Hebron under the pressure and threats of the Haganah.
These two opposing journeys of displacement unfold in contrasting directions: the Jewish trajectory moves from north to south, while the Palestinian one extends from south to east, into Jordan, and then northward to Belgium. Through a succession of surprises, horrors, and tragic dramatic events, the novel explores not only these intertwined destinies but also what became of the houses and homes left behind.

In a brief note on the novel's back cover, the publisher writes:
"How and why was the label 'the Belgian' given to a Palestinian refugee in Jordan? What narratives and circumstances lie behind it? In Hosheng Ossi's novel 'The Belgian's Houses,' readers will find an attempt to answer these questions, along with other thorny questions concerning identity and its many layers, and the ways in which major and minor tragedies individual as well as collective have contributed to shaping it. How can a victim in one place become an oppressor and perpetrator elsewhere? Can the descendants of victims and perpetrators reconcile in order to build a future better than a past marked by extreme cruelty and bloodshed? These are among the issues that 'The Belgian's Houses' seeks to address. Readers can therefore expect a wealth of questions and ideas that challenge the official narratives that have long been exported and entrenched in the public imagination."
The publisher further describes the book as "a novel against violence and war, and against all narratives, ideologies, and doctrines that seek to legitimize them; a novel of events, surprises, details, shocks, and the fluctuations of the human psyche and the lives of individuals and societies."
It is worth noting that Hosheng Ossi writes in both Arabic and Kurdish, and "The Belgian's Houses" is his seventh novel. His debut novel, "The Weight of Certainty," won the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and was subsequently translated into English and French.
Ossi's literary and cultural work encompasses poetry, short fiction, journalism, research, and cultural and political criticism, in addition to novel writing. To date, he has published around twenty books across these various literary genres.
In 2021, with the support of PEN Flanders, a selection of Hosheng Ossi's poems was translated into Dutch by the Poetry Centre in Ghent and published in a collection entitled "I Am Not a Sea, but My Heart Is Full of Seagulls."
Ossi has been living in the city of Ostend since 2013. He dedicated his novel "The Belgian's Houses" to the cities of Antwerp and Jerusalem.