The Parachute Paradox

Eric Hoffer Award winner announcement on The US Review of Books:

"The Parachute Paradox, Steve Sabella, Kerber Verlag - With a clever and intriguing cover, this book eagerly invites the reader to explore its contents. Perhaps the fact that the author is an accomplished artist and photographer explains the volume's elegant appearance. The book's content isn't any less appealing. We learn the story of a Christian boy growing up among Arabs in Israeli-occupied Palestine, drowning in the toxic national and religious ideology that surrounds him. We later discover a young man who's freedom does not exist except as an expression of his art, and as an endless love for the girl of his dreams. We finally encounter a mature, conflicted man pursuing his career in exile and using art as the vehicle of his liberation.

This memoir offers a glimpse into the perpetual Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of an innocent bystander, who struggles to survive and who learns to live free, if only in his mind. Meanwhile, the Palestinian and the Israeli existence continues to be linked like the parachute jumper and his trainer, who descend in a dangerous tandem toward an insecure future."

THE PARACHUTE PARADOX AN ARTIST'S LAW OF RETURN 

By Almºt Sh. Bruckstein

"Steve Sabella, artist, thinker, writer, film-maker and photographer, is a son of the Old City of Jerusalem. His roots are spread heavenwards, and he signs his books as a citizen of planet earth. We celebrate his latest work, The Parachute Paradox, a mesmerizing life story. A book about home, about Jerusalem, about the effects and after-effects of the occupation, the occupation of Palestine, of the self, of Jerusalem, about the hijacking of tradition, the hijacking of the image, even the image of Jerusalem, and most importantly about what the artist calls the colonization of the artistic imagination.

This meticulously produced book is about exile, not only that of the artist, but even of Jerusalem, the city of prophets who so miserably betrays her promise to act as a secure haven for all its citizens. It is a book about the artist's exiled mother tongue, about alienated speech and failed communications, about exiled dreams, and most disturbingly, about the haunting experience of the protagonist's imagination being locked-in by the politics of separation, by the violation of human rights, in other words: by the conditions of life dictated by the Israeli occupation.

One of the liberating features of The Parachute Paradox is the fact that it starts off with a very simple premise: just as there is no question about rape being unjust, so there is no question that living under occupation cripples life. "I am not pro-Palestinian, I am pro-justice"-these words by the political theorist Norman Finkelstein are fully endorsed by the artist, and they are so naturally presumed by the author that the pros and cons of this question are of no concern to the book.

The question of The Parachute Paradox is, rather, how to break free, how to rescue the artistic imagination and the author's life from the grip of its colonizer. The author Steve Sabella, in a brilliant dramaturgic move, in the end breaks free from the fate of his protagonist, inspired and supported by precious literary and real life collaborators, most importantly his love Francesca, his daughter C©cile, and a handful of his closest artist friends, some of whom honor us with their presence.

...The Parachute Paradox is a book about liberation, freedom and return."