I had been corresponding by e-mail with Dr. Jamal Assadi, chair of the English department at the College of Sakhnin for Teacher’s Education, in Sakhnin, Israel, for almost nine months.

I knew that Jamal was an Israeli-Arab Muslim and that over the first week of December, 2007, I would be teaching in his college and in the Arab secondary school next door. I knew that I, my 12-year-old son, Jack, and my friend, Glenda Zahller, would be staying at the Assadi’s house in the nearby village of Deir-al-Assad, hosted by Jamal and his wife, Dalia, and their six children: five boys and one girl.

From reading short stories by Arab-Israeli writers that Jamal had translated, I had some sense of village life and customs. The airline tickets were bought, I was part of the college and school curriculum. But in October, when Jamal e-mailed me a photo of his daughter, Rola, I gulped. A lovely girl with a kind face stood in front of the Dome of the Rock mosque. What threw me was Rola’s garb: she was wearing a white headscarf, a hijab, and her hair was completely covered.

A hijab! Jamal’s daughter wore a hijab? Somehow, I’d never expected this. The Jamal I knew from the e-mails was intellectual, modern, witty. He made jokes about our arriving and damning our bad luck for staying with terrorists from the Middle East. He had earned a Ph.D. in English literature in England and published books about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow. For the first time, I felt apprehension about the trip. What was I getting into? Would I embarrass myself and everyone else? Could I see a woman in a hijab as a regular human being?

I had been to Israel two times in the previous two years. I’d loved it there. I’d wanted to do something useful on a return trip, and something I could do was help teach people to write fiction. To this end, I’d approached Rabbi Marc Rosenstein, whose weekly Letter from the Galilee is distributed on e-mail by the Union of Reform Judaism. Rabbi Rosenstein facilitates communication between different ethnic groups that live in the Galilee, and he referred me to Jamal.

"The five sons look normal," I remember saying, "but Jamal’s daughter wears a hijab." Looking back, I wince at that statement.

After two nights in Tel Aviv, on a Saturday afternoon Glenda, Jack, and I took a taxi to Deir-al-Assad, a hillside village of 7,000 in the Galilee. The cab driver was a sabra whose parents had made aliyah from Morocco. The cab driver spoke Arabic, and was intrigued by our staying in an Arab village, saying, "It’s good to meet different kinds of people." He delivered us to the gas station where the Assadi’s oldest son, Ali, home for the weekend from university in Jordan, met us to take us to the house.

The Assadi house

About 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab. Most are Muslims but some are Christian. By and large, Jews and Arabs live in totally separate towns or parts of towns, although Akko, Haifa, and Tel Aviv are places where Jews and Arabs live as neighbors.

Between Jews and Arabs in Israel, there can be mutual distrust. "We don’t like them and they don’t like us," was a comment I’d heard from a Jew. Following our village stay, we toured Israel and our guide, Israeli Hertzog, told us about relatives of his who couldn’t sell their house in northern Jerusalem because their neighbors were Arabs.

Deir-al-Assad is a town of steep, winding, narrow streets and large, multi-storied houses. Plucked chickens and sides of lamb and beef hung in front of the butcher shop. Until 30 years ago, Jamal told us later, the roads in this village weren’t paved and there was no central electricity system.

Some animals are still kept in town: a family two doors from the Assadis kept goats below their living area, beside another house we saw a donkey.

The houses in Deir al-Assad can look as big as apartment buildings, which in a way they are: several generations of a family will share one house, grandparents, parents, and sons and their families in separate lodgings.

Sometimes floors of a house are left unfinished until they are needed for a married child.

The Assadis at home

Glenda and Jack and I were escorted to an apartment on the fourth floor of the house (the two middle floors are unfinished) with a bedroom, sitting area/kitchen and bathroom. Fruit juices, shampoo, Q-tips — everything had been set out for us. Outside the apartment, a large, tiled patio overlooked the town and valley, giving us, as Jamal had promised, "the best view in the village."

The Assadis and our little group hit it off. In the most basic sense, I liked their looks: Dalia’s kind face and Jamal’s amused one, Ali’s leaning forward eagerly to talk about his studies, Rola’s glowing smile, Mohammad’s sleepy eyes and slow grin, Mahmoud’s mischievous watchfulness, Ahmed’s intensity as he drew a lion, Abed’s cheerful bouncing around the room. The Assadis are observant Muslims: no alcohol or pork in their house, regular prayers through the day, Jamal dashing off to pray at the local mosque each evening.

Glenda Zahller (L) and the author on the rooftop patio of the Assadi home

Arab hospitality is renowned, and we soon understood why. After our first dinner — chicken stuffed with rice, several types of salad, hummus, pita, and an eggplant dish — Jack said in a tone of wonder, "This is delicious. Do you eat like this every day?" We did. Even our breakfasts were a treat: fava beans and pita, labaneh cheese, eggs poached in tomato sauce.

In a gesture emblematic of our hostess’s kind attentiveness, one chilly evening as I sat talking with visitors, with only my socks on, as was the custom inside, I heard a faint slap-slap on the floor beside me. Dalia had placed two slippers beside my feet.

The morning after our arrival — Sunday, the start of the work week — Glenda and I headed off with Jamal to the city of Sakhnin, a 20-minute drive, to volunteer at the secondary school and college. We spent most of our time in the secondary school, which has classes in grades six to 12. The students, a mixed group of boys and girls, pass a test to qualify for this private school, and some come from as far away as Akko and Nazareth.

My first time with each class, I asked each student to write a letter in English to someone they missed, using as many details as possible. The students almost all managed to coax out some details: the color of a coat, the tale of two boys running from a dog, a little girl’s red lips "not helping her" in saying the Arab word for grandpa. Later classes involved making up a character and writing descriptions of settings.

The secondary school students had just done a unit on natural disasters and when I showed them where we lived in the U.S., their eyes widened. "Do you have tornados?" they asked.

In several classes someone blurted out, "Are you a Jew?" Each time, the response "yes" was greeted with silent surprise, then seemed to be quickly forgotten.

Arab students in Israel are required to start Hebrew in fourth grade and English in fifth. Some start earlier. By age 12, the students I saw were familiar with three languages and alphabets. I found their English astonishingly good.

They sometimes forgot that English, unlike Arabic or Hebrew, does not assign a gender to inanimate objects, and that, in the present tense, English requires a verb for "to be." A typical mistake: "My room, she nice."

Teaching kindergartners 'I'm a little teapot'

Each day, Glenda and I spent seven hours at the school or the college next door. We changed classes at the secondary school every 45 minutes.

Each class had up to 30 students. Glenda was impressed by the students’ work ethic. "You say, ‘Do this’ and they get out their pen and notebook and do it."

By the end of the week, when Glenda and I passed a classroom between class periods, students burst from the door to wave. Several times we were assigned to a room and found the students cheering when we walked in. "You realize," Glenda said, "this is the closest we’ll ever be to rock stars."

One assignment had the students writing about their bedrooms. A class of seventh graders completed this so quickly I asked them to write about "The Worst Bedroom in the World." This was a hit. Dead mice, pizza under the bed, mold on the walls: students vied to share their paragraphs.

The classes with the college students — all of whom were women studying to be English teachers — lasted an hour and a half.

We moved beyond the basics to writing dialogue and discussing plot. The second-year college students came in voluntarily outside their assigned class time to write.

There were moments with those second-years — lovely young women bent over their notebooks, brows furrowed, dropping their pens and lifting their eyes only to leaf through their dictionaries — that I was overwhelmed with a kind of love for them. I’ve never seen anyone so eager to learn.

Back at the Assadi house, Dalia would take us visiting in the evenings — to her or Jamal’s parents, to siblings, to neighbors. "Welcome, welcome!" people would say, even if that was the only English they knew, and we would enter the home, sit, and wait for treats.

Jack Jacobs with Jamal Assadi's parents

As wonderful as our visit was, it was not unmarked by tension. One evening we three Americans and Jamal and Dalia had dinner at the home of a prominent Arab-Israeli writer. His wife made a magnificent meal, including grilled fish caught that day. Making conversation, I asked the wife where she was from. Jamal translated. The woman said something in Arabic. There was a sudden silence at the table. "Well," Jamal said after a moment, "she is from a village that was destroyed in 1948."

I love Israel partly for its complexity, and that quality is hugely evident in the differing views Jews and Arabs have about the founding of the state of Israel. While Jews celebrate the formation of Israel as a triumphant fulfillment of will and destiny, the Arab term for the event is al Nakba, the catastrophe. While Jews recall with pride settling and improving the land, Arabs remember being forced out. As a writer, I started to think of the Arab-Jewish conflict as a clash of narratives. Who has the better (or worse) story? Who has suffered more?

One night, I met the former mayor of a neighboring Arab village, an immensely dignified man of 80 who told me that the leaders of his village, in 1948, preached not to fight back against the Jews. To stay in place was to resist, he said. The new Israelis, he said, wanted Arab villages to fight so that the Israelis could beat them by force and gain more land. He dropped his voice and added: "And there had already been Deir Yassin."

Deir Yassin was an Arab village on the outskirts of Jerusalem attacked by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, two Jewish militias, in April, 1948. Reportedly, the killing was indiscriminate and included women and children. Our guide later in the trip, Israeli Hertzog, recalled being horrified when he first heard about the event (he says he never heard about it in school), feeling it was a stain on the Jewish people. I had never heard of Deir Yassin and had to look it up. While it’s clear that the attack happened and about 100 Arabs were killed, there are Web sites devoted to the "Deir Yassin Massacre" and Web sites devoted to proving the attack was a successful military operation and not a massacre at all. Still, several Arab-Israelis I spoke to mentioned it: an example of a story that one group wants memorialized, even expanded, and another group wants forgotten, even erased.

It did cross my mind, more than once, that the easy conversations Jamal and I shared about controversial topics might not be possible if I were Israeli. I was like a foreign, distant cousin, not attuned to the day-to-day squabbles and long-standing grudges and oft-repeated tales of feuding cousins.

For whatever reason, the streets and electric and telephone wires were less lovely in the Arab towns and villages we saw than in other Israeli towns. On two mornings, our Deir-al-Assad house had no water, a situation that one Israeli said he’d never heard of in a Jewish town.

Jamal expressed frustration with the Israeli government’s treatment of people living in the West Bank — "It is very hard for people to move around there" — and Gaza — "Every day the Israelis kill someone." He spoke of injustice in aspects of the Israeli educational and security systems.

Still, Jamal was happy to be Israeli. "I go to Egypt, they see my passport, they treat me very well. It’s not respect, it’s fear. They know Israel will look after its citizens. When, if you are an Egyptian, there is no one looking out for you, you are not even a human being."

"I can speak freely here," Jamal said. "I can speak about being an Israeli Palestinian. Even the West Bank people don’t trust us. But, paradoxically, we are the people keeping the Palestinian traditions alive. We don’t intermarry, we have our villages, our language, our customs. We are not diluted out by other things."

Jamal told about being part of a traveling Arab delegation several years ago. Because he was Israeli, the other Arabs were leery of him, but, on Friday, the Muslim holy day, he was the only one to attend the required prayers.

Second-year English students at the Teacher's College of Sakhnin, Israel

How do I come up with characters for my novels? How do I manage to fulfill all my different roles? What time of day do I write? What if I have nothing to say? How do I decide what to write about? Does it bother me that my husband doesn’t read over my writing? What do I think of Muslims? What do I think of Arab hospitality? Will I come back?

Hijabs were, I’d realized, not an issue. I thought but didn’t say that the headscarf girls in the college and school were among the brightest, most focused students. I wondered if for some women the headscarf was a liberating statement: I’m not fluff, I’m not a sex object. Take me seriously.

Once the questions were over, two gorgeous Bedouin sisters, each tall with dark skin, long, straight black hair, and a bejeweled tooth, came up and started speaking to me in fluent, exuberant Spanish, a Spanish that put my crabbed and academic Spanish to shame.

Surprises, they everywhere.

Martha Moody Jacobs’ latest novel, Office of Desire, was included in Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2007. She is a frequent contributor to The Dayton Jewish Observer.