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Ruth Knafo Setton. The Road to Fez. Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 2001. 231 pp. ISBN 1-58243-082-9.
Moroccan born, Ruth Knafo Setton now lives in Pennsylvania and is Writer in Residence for the Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University. Although The Road to Fez is her first novel, she has published other works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in various anthologies and journals.
The Road to Fez begins when its eighteen-year-old heroine visits her grandparents' home in Morocco and ends with her departure for Israel to join her widowed father. Posing as Christians from Paris, Brit's parents emigrated to the United States when she was six. Now, she has returned in order to fulfill her recently deceased mother's wish that she make a pilgrimage to Fez, to the tomb of Suleika, the seventeen-year-old Jewish girl beheaded in 1834 for refusing to convert to the Muslim religion. At the end of her visit, just prior to her departure from Morocco, Brit keeps her promise to her mother. Accompanied by her Uncle Gaby, her mother's younger brother, she takes the road to Fez, to Suleika's tomb. There, Brit has a vision of her own and thus adds her voice to the multitude of voices throughout the text that proffer conflicting Arab and Jewish perspectives about the nature of Suleika's character -- the possible motives for her bewildering decisions -- beyond the few facts available about Suleika's brief life and cruel death.
In a recent interview, Setton said of herself that she loves to "take risks," to "bite into the forbidden fruit, turn the key of the locked room, lift the veil, peer behind the curtain, become a trespasser of country, body and soul." Setton is not inspired to write directly about political, philosophical, or religious topics, but obliquely, within the context of "where the exotic and the erotic become facets of each other." Concluding idealistically that other human beings, like her, "desire what we don't fully know and understand," she therefore writes that for us all "the exotic is the erotic." Alas, "we" human beings also seem to fear, hate, and destroy "what we don't fully know and understand," rather than always only be drawn to it, or want to learn about it.
Tellingly, Setton...