A man who left burning Jerusalem with his wife and children and immigrated to America, receives - after years of complete separation from his parents and siblings - a message from his father: "I'm in a hospital". He gets on a plane to accompany him through his illness and confronts his past as well as his life in the present, in the shadow of two traumatic separations: the one that has already happened, the forced separation from the castle where he was born and raised; And this is expected, the last farewell to his father. Why did his family ostracize him? And why is he also forced to live in complete solitude in the United States, removed by his wife from their shared home? And how does all this have to do with the fact that many years ago he wrote a short story about a girl named Palestine? The soul-searching he conducts at his father's bedside in the hospital, in Hebrew and Arabic, will be a painful and deceptive journey - since this man is a writer who makes a living by writing other people's memoirs, and in his writing you never know what is true and what is false, which memories are his and which are those of others. Follow Changes, the fourth book of prose by the writer, screenwriter and journalist Seyed Kashua (Arabs dance, and there will be a morning and second person singular), is his most personal and complex book to date. This is a fictional novel that makes sophisticated use of details from the well-known biography of its author, from the creators beloved in Israeli culture (the TV series Avoda Arabi and the screenwriter), that is, a novel that invites us to read it as a "confession" - but at the same time constantly thwarts its credibility and demands to be read as a story that never happened. Beyond all these, Follow Changes is a work that investigates the stories that Israelis tell themselves about their lives, what they choose to remember and what they prefer to forget, the blurred boundaries between personal and national memories, and above all a work that addresses to its readers the intimate question: what is the first memory your?
