The Diamond Setter - A Novel

In this revised edition of a novel of exile, inheritance, and return, the fates of two families—one Palestinian, one Jewish—intertwine across generations and borders.

In 2011, Fareed Jabbali, a young Palestinian from Damascus, crosses the border into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa, in search of his grandparents’ lost homeland. He carries in his pocket a rare blue diamond—once a gift to a celebrated chanteuse who sang for the Ottoman sultan—and intends to return it to its rightful owners. More than a relic, the stone is an unsettled debt between two families, waiting to be claimed.

In Tel Aviv, Menashe Salomon, a Jewish jeweler born in 1949 to a family of Damascene jewelers, runs a modest shop, unaware that a long-lost piece of his family’s past is about to resurface. His mother, Adela, once lived in Damascus, where she fell in love with a Palestinian woman, Laila Jabbali—Fareed’s grandmother. As Menashe and Fareed’s paths converge, they confront a question that lingers over the novel: Can what was lost ever truly be restored?

A mosaic of characters and cities—Damascus, Jaffa, Beirut, Tel Aviv—The Diamond Setter bears witness to the Arab-Jewish world destroyed in 1948 and to the long shadow of the Nakba. Now revised with a new preface, this edition recenters the novel on the Palestinian journey of return and on the vanished Levantine world the twentieth century erased.