In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told. 

In revealing the contradictory identity of the “Arabs of Israel”, Elias Khoury also weaves together in an unprecedented way, the Holocaust and the Nakba, and grasps with great sensitivity, the heart of the Palestinian tragedy: The silence to which they are reduced.