'A Woman Is No Man' explores the toll of domestic violence on an Arab immigrant family

Novels about the immigrant experience often turn on the psychic trauma that families endure in a new country. Etaf Rum understands that the experience can leave physical bruises, too.

Her heartfelt and piercing debut novel, “A Woman Is No Man” (Harper, 352 pp., ★★★ out of four), explores how domestic violence infects one family of Arab immigrants. In 1990, Isra, a 17-year-old Palestinian, is hastily married off to Adam, a deli manager in Brooklyn. New York sounds promising, and she’s deluged in gold on her wedding day. But her mother cautions that the American Dream is a man's business.

“Marriage, motherhood – that is a woman’s only worth,” Isra is told.

Fast-forward 18 years: Deya, Isra’s eldest daughter, is chafing against that sexist mantra. Isra and Adam died when she was 7 – a car accident, she’s told – and her aunt Fareeda is now running her through a gauntlet of cooking, cleaning and dismal meetings with potential suitors. Deya would rather escape to college, haunted as she is by memories of “Adam yelling on the other side of the wall, her mother weeping, then even more terrible sounds. A bang against the wall. A loud yelp.”

Rum, herself the child of Palestinian immigrants, elegantly braids Isra and Deya’s stories. Isra is all but commanded to deliver a son, but as daughter after daughter arrives – four total – Adam becomes more remote. Some of his behavior is acculturated – he’s determined to obey his parents, who endured refugee camps and adhere to patriarchal standards. But his insecurity, escalating alcoholism and abusiveness are all his own.

Deya attends an all-girls Islamic school and is effectively caged in her Brooklyn home, yet she finds private ways to revolt; an Eminem CD smuggled into the classroom offers a seductive message of defiance. Her universe expands further when Fareeda’s daughter Sarah enters her life. Instead of the good daughter married off in Palestine, as Fareeda says, she’s managing a Manhattan bookstore that might serve as a portal to a different life for Deya. Her first steps in the city reveal just how cloistered she’s been: “People swerved by like hundreds of Ping-Pong balls” and she can smell “every whiff of its garbage and grease.”

Rum delays multiple revelations (like Isra’s true fate) for dramatic effect, and in the meantime, the novel can feel overstuffed with Fareeda’s repeated lecturing to both Isra and Deya about serving husbands and having sons. (Scenes from Fareeda’s perspective are too-rare humanizing touches; she bears serious scars, too.) But the delaying is also purposeful, evoking the anxiety many families suffer about speaking up about domestic abuse, and the layers of lies and changing the subject that enable and perpetuate “the chain of shame passed from one woman to the next.”

Though Deya didn’t know her mother well, they shared a bond over literature and the sense of freedom books provide. “I just don’t have a taste for romances anymore,” Isra says at one point. “I’d rather read a book that teaches me something… A story that is more realistic.”

That’s Rum’s ambition too, one she admirably fulfills.