By the time Abir was shot, Elhanan and Aramin were close friends. Aramin co-founded the activist group Combatants for Peace Elhanan joined up after his son Elik brought him to a meeting, some seven years before Abir’s death. Its primary subject is the fraternal relationship between the girls’ fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew. This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters - a number alluding to “The Thousand and One Arabian Nights” - reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows. An apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite yet countable number of sides. These real-life events form the seed of “Apeirogon,” Colum McCann’s powerful and prismatic new novel.
Her ambulance was delayed for hours at a border checkpoint, and she died two days later at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the same hospital where Smadar was born. The local Palestinian clinic where Abir was treated had little working equipment, so doctors decided to transfer her to a better-equipped hospital on the other side of the wall. A decade later, and less than three miles away, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, wearing her school uniform and holding a candy bracelet she’d just bought, was shot in the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier as his jeep sped around a corner.
4, 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan - dressed in a Blondie T-shirt, her hair cut short, her Walkman playing Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U” - was walking down Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts, killing themselves, Smadar and four others.
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