Light Years
Guilt is a pretty heavy burden to carry, especially for a young person just starting out on his or her own journey of life.
Maya is riddled with guilt. She keeps reliving her past, her life in the army that led her to her first assignment in Tel Aviv and meeting her first love, Dov, another army recruit working in the same office.
Had she not insisted on an assignment away from home, she would not have met Dov and he would still be alive. Had she not agreed to go out with friends, including Dov, their romance might never have started. Had she not insisted on taking a foreign visitor to her favourite café, Maya would not have met the angry Palestinian who hated Jews. She would not have heard that he spit into the water before he served it. She would not have relayed this information to the manager, resulting in the Palestinian being fired, of becoming angry and of training to become a suicide bomber so that he could seek his revenge a year later.
The list of "what ifs" goes on. Maya cannot escape her nightmarish past, until she can accept that she is not responsible and that she has a right to live life to its fullest. Maya comes to the University of Virginia to escape her past; but her past finds her and continues to haunt her. Through the help of new friends, one which develops into a new romance, Maya begins to accept that she is not responsible for what happened to her boyfriend. A friend leads her through a history lesson on guilt and she discovers Epictetus, a Roman slave, whose advice was "to let go of what you cannot control, focus only on what falls directly under your control — your opinions, your will, your moral fortitude."
I think all young adults, and even older adults, can learn a lot from this novel. As Maya discovers herself and her right to life, she leads the reader past the power of guilt to realize that life can still be good in spite of all the sorrows and hardships it might bring. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is full of horror stories, which may be totally incomprehensible to North Americans. Why kill so many, why fight so long over such a small, arid piece of land. I know I have come to understand a lot more from reading Stein's novel. The Middle East may well be a hothouse of unrest and bloodshed; but it is also a beloved homeland to so many people.
