"There''s an Ethiopian; there''s an Ethiopian!" I heard them shouting. I looked behind me, but I couldn''t see any Ethiopian. Children began crowding round me, and I still didn''t realize that they meant me, I was the Ethiopian.
Meskerem was born in a small town called Kazerin in the Golan Heights of Israel, to an Ethiopian mother and an American father. Soon after Operation Solomon, when several thousand Ethiopian immigrants were brought to Israel, Meskerem''s parents decided to move to the center of the country, to the town of Herzelia, where Meskerem comes face-to-face with the ignorance and prejudices of her new classmates, who are meeting someone dark-skinned for the first time. Her experiences, coming on the brink of adolescence, force her to confront her mixed identity. With the help of her Ethiopian grandmother, who remained in Kazerin, Meskerem learns to come to terms with who she is and find strength in belonging to three different cultures.
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