By Jim Hicks
“Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” The definition comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a preface to her translation of eighteenth-century Bengali poetry. I didn’t learn much in grad school, but I do remember at least one thing: it’s a very bad idea to argue with Gayatri Spivak. So I won’t. However, her insight, which has been seconded by scholars of translation everywhere, should really be understood as both a blessing and a curse. If translation is an intimate act, what then happens when a translator translates testimony from a witness to genocide?
Surely that translator is blessed to have been given a task of great urgency and lasting historical importance. Yet is this act of translation even possible? Can anyone from outside claim intimate knowledge of unspeakable crimes, especially someone with a privileged, sheltered perspective that never has had, and is unlikely ever to have, experience in any way approximating the lives that such an account must inevitably represent? Moreover, according to this definition, if translation is not intimate, it likely isn’t translation at all, but instead simply betrayal—a false, distant, whitewashed image of the reality it purports to convey. And if the translation fails, won’t readers necessarily fail as well? Or do readers inevitably fail anyway, if they fail to approximate the intimate act of translation?
Sami al-Ajrami’s The Keys to My House. A Gaza Diary responds to each of these questions, and it does so with precision, compassion, and grace. Sami is a reporter who has worked for both Arab and Israeli newspapers as well as a host of other news agencies, both regional and European. We may surely stipulate, without fear of contradiction, that the past two years in Gaza qualify as what Jalal Toufic calls a “surpassing disaster,” and therefore we can also grant that the world will never fully know, that words can never adequately represent, the Palestinian experience—but that does not remove the obligation to report. What it does mean is that every reporter is also by definition a translator, and thus the weight on Sami al-Ajrami’s shoulders is that of translation on every level: linguistic, cultural, even world-historical. In other words, the intimacy that Spivak intuits is a two-way street: we may read and understand as best we can, what Sami writes, but we should also remember that, like any good translator, al-Ajrami is in conversation with us.
This is no metaphor. Each day at 2:00 p.m., for the better part of six months (assuming that Sami could charge his phone, that the network wasn’t down, and that other emergencies didn’t take precedence), he would call to speak with Anna Lombardi and her colleagues in the foreign affairs office of Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper. Each day he would recount what he had seen and heard and respond to questions about what he and his family, what his friends—what all of Gaza—was enduring, and his Italian colleagues would write it up. They would answer his questions too; the news went both ways. Readers of his book need to appreciate the exceptional, collective origin of this narrative. Sami and Anna’s intimate knowledge of their audience—of our language, of what we need to know—is the true gift within its pages.
Sami’s war diary begins on October 13, 2023, with his family’s exodus from their home in Gaza City. He then paints a brief, personal picture of the “Last Day of Peace,” following it with a real-time account of the October 7 attack—given to us just as he and other Gazan journalists begin to piece together what is happening, and as they begin to reflect on what may happen next. From then on, we continue to follow—always in present tense, like a car driving through dense fog at night – Sami’s war reports as well as his daily accounts of his family and friends, doing whatever they can to survive. The book ends just over six months later, with the author’s departure from Gaza. Only at that point, in Egypt, did al-Ajrami and Lombardi meet for the first time, and they were able to continue the conversations that became this book.
As I write these words, despite the current “ceasefire” (during which hundreds of Palestinians have already been killed), Israel continues to prohibit the international press from witnessing and reporting freely on its actions in Gaza. Moreover, Israel, with outrageous hypocrisy, also discredits—not to mention targeting and murdering—Gazan reporters, while insuring that no other accounts will be written. For this reason, The Keys to My House is all the more precious. Despite the valiant efforts of a small number of translators, little magazines, and independent presses, for readers in English, stories like that of Sami al-Ajrami have remained largely untold and unheard. Given the power of the U.S., along with its role in aiding and abetting these massive war crimes, we should not be surprised that the story of Palestinian suffering—the ongoing Nakba—has not been a primary focus of Western news coverage.
After more than two years of genocidal slaughter, however, readers of Sami’s book may also wonder what will be gained by returning to an account of the war’s first six months. Haven’t events—the surpassing disaster being visited upon Gaza—long since eclipsed the undeniable horrors of this early period? For me, this question brings to mind the words of the Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, in what is arguably the most important essay ever written on torture. Améry observes that, with the very first blow, the victim of torture loses what he calls “trust in the world”: “the certainty that the other, on the basis of written or unwritten social contracts, will spare me, and more precisely that they will respect my physical and thus also metaphysical existence.” He further notes that, “with the first blow from a police officer’s fist, against which there can be no resistance and which no helping hand will parry, a part of our life ends and can never be revived.” What we realize in reading Sami al-Ajrami’s Gazan diary is that the early months of the war already contained the seeds of everything to come.
To give a quick example: its first chapter from December 2024 begins simply, “Gaza City no longer exists.” I happened to translate that passage in mid-September 2025, just after Israel had launched its final ground offensive on the city, and just after the UN commission of inquiry had announced its verdict that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. During January 2025, Sami reports on an Israeli conference that gathered ex-settlers of Gaza for a discussion of how to recolonize the Strip. He comments,
I continue to think that this must be Israel’s real plan. In the North, entire villages have been flattened, the farmland has been devastated, and they’ve exploded all the buildings left standing after the bombing. They don’t want to leave us anything to return to.
Should we have been surprised, then, by the news in mid-October 2025 that Israeli troops, prior to their “retreat,” burned large sections of Gaza City, including the last functional component of its sanitation infrastructure, thus ensuring that city will remain uninhabitable, perhaps for years? The pages of this book not only foresee much of the year and a half since al-Ajrami’s exile from his homeland, they also warn about what may still be coming.
From the war’s earliest days, friends and family came daily to ask Sami for advice. Many of the most intimate moments in The Keys to My House relate stories about the small community of choice he helps assemble, a mutual aid organization of roughly sixty people with four families at its center. “Each week,” he tells us, “by sacrificing something from our scant rations, we manage to organize a special meal and prepare a dessert or some other dish that breaks the monotony. Planning this activity quickly becomes our main goal and purpose; the dinners are a product of research and sacrifice, and we all participate.” Given the horrors they hope to survive, and all the evidence of inhumanity in these pages, such moments are a salutary reminder that, to cite Svetlana Broz, there are also “good people in dark times.”
Still, the demands placed on Sami must have occasionally been unbearable: in one instance, he advises family members where to move; after taking his suggestion and moving to a “safe area,” they end up dying under the bombing anyway. On another occasion, he convinces a friend to leave his apartment and finds another place for him and his family to stay. This time, just a few hours after the family moves, their home is destroyed. While staying with friends of friends in Rafah, Sami describes how his work causes this small community to depend on him: “As a journalist, I have access to WhatsApp groups where I exchange information with my colleagues […] and so, each night I become the evening news.” As his readers, thus, we are simply another link in a collaborative chain that began in Gaza; each day, Sami distilled the essence of everything he learned, he reflected on and analyzed its content, then narrated these events for others. Somehow, with the help of Anna Lombardi, the book’s straightforward, lucid prose manages to convey a reality that remains unimaginable, even, I imagine, for its witnesses.
As I finished this translation, some questions came to me, thoughts that I suspect many of his readers will share. Shouldn’t we ask Sami for an update? How are he and his daughters doing now, in the time since they left Gaza? What about the many friends and family members who we come to know in these pages? Are they safe? Have they even survived? What hopes do they have for their future? The more I thought about it, however, the more certain I was that we have no right to such questions. As readers, we would surely love a happy ending, and perhaps even tragedy would offer some form of closure. Yet Jean Améry gets this right too, when he cites Proust on this score: “‘Nothing actually happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will.’ But not because, as they say, it ‘exceeds our ability to imagine’ (it’s not a quantitative question), but instead because it isn’t imagination, but rather, reality.”
To the extent we share the horror, the angst, the unbearable knowledge that anyone and everyone’s survival today in Gaza still dangles on a thread, perhaps we do have some intimate sense of Palestinians must be feeling.
The above essay is Jim Hicks’ “Translator’s Note” to his translation from Italian, with Anna Botta, of Sami al-Ajrami’s The Keys to My House, written with Anna Lombardi. Olive Branch Press, 2026.
Jim Hicks is the former executive editor of the Massachusetts Review, Recent translations include Sami Al-Ajrami’s The Keys to My House. A Gaza Diary and Federica Marzi’s My Home Somewhere Else. His current book project, The Interpreter’s Tale, is a collection of stories based on interviews with interpreters in Sarajevo.