Rum’s primary protagonist is Isra Hadid, initially a 17-year-old Palestinian girl living with her parents in the small town of Birzeit. Without her consent, Isra is married and shipped off to America to start her new life as a compliant wife and mother. Isra is overwhelmed by her new family, new husband, and new country. She is an introvert, cowed by her bullying mother-in-law, but even more by cultural obligations. Raised in a culture that discourages women from doing anything other than housework and child bearing, Isra responds to her obligations dutifully, but over time, those obligations and her husband’s abuse drag her into a deep depression.

One of the hallmarks of this kind of subjugation is convincing the victim that pain is their birthright, and Isra shoulders the guilt and blame just as readily as she shoulders her duties. Even after witnessing Sarah’s defiance, after Adam’s repeated beatings with no justification, and after questioning her own subjugation, Isra cannot shake the certainty that she alone is at fault for her own suffering: “Who was to blame? She thought it was herself” (248). On the spectrum of tradition, Isra represents the Old World, replete with its rigid customs and antiquated views of gender, but Isra also straddles both Old and New Worlds.