Based on conversations with Palestinians in Israel, David Grossman's Sleeping on a Wire, like The Yellow Wind, is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Middle East today. Israel describes itself as a Jewish state. What, then, is the status of the one-fifth of its citizens who are not Jewish? Are they Israelis, or are they Palestinians? Or are they a people without a country? How will a Palestinian state--if it is established--influence the sense of belonging and identity of Palestinian Israeli citizens? No other Israeli writer so far has approached this touchy subject with such compassion, or looked at it with, so to speak, bifocal eyes, Israeli and Palestinian. --Amos Elon, The New York Review of Books