Inspired by true events, this best-selling Israeli novel traces a complex web of love triangles and family secrets across generations and borders. The uneventful life of a jeweler from Tel Aviv changes abruptly after Fareed, a handsome young man from Damascus, crosses illegally into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa in search of his roots. In his pocket is a piece of a famous blue diamond known as Sabakh. Intending to return the diamond to its rightful owner, Fareed is soon swept up in Tel Aviv’s vibrant gay scene, and a turbulent protest movement. He falls in love with an Israeli soldier and his boyfriend, the narrator of this book. We learn the story of his family’s past—a tale of forbidden love beginning in the 1930s—and what connects Fareed and the jeweler.
The Diamond Setter ties present-day events to a forgotten time before the creation of the State of Israel. Moshe Sakal’s poignant mosaic of characters, locales, and cultures allows us to imagine the Middle East beyond its conflicts.
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.
