Rami Elhanan

Rami Elhanan is one of the two main protagonists of the novel, along with Bassam Aramin. Rami is the Israeli narrator—a graphic designer by trade living in Jerusalem who lost his daughter Smadar during a street suicide bombing by Palestinian fighters. Since the event, he has embarked on speaker tours and engagements all across the country and the world, forging a strong and unlikely friendship with Bassam as the two speak about peace, grief, and reconciliation in the face of one of the most complex geopolitical and ethnoreligious conflicts in modern history. He is married to Nurit Elhanan and is the son of a Holocaust survivor from Hungary.

Rami’s character is made quite dynamic through the many memories and vignettes interwoven throughout the story. The death of his daughter changed him immeasurably, and the reader sees this in his political opinions, in his compassion, in...