Alison Pick has made the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist for Not in Their Names.

She will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and her essay has been published on CBC Books.

The winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will be announced Sept. 26. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions until Nov 1. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025 and the CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2025.

This year's CBC Nonfiction Prize jury is composed of Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe. The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlist, which is chosen by a committee of writers and editors from across the country. Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style.

For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.

Alison Pick's novel Far to Go was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and has been optioned by House of Film in Toronto. Her memoir Between Gods was shortlisted for both the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and for the JQ Wingate Prize in the UK.

Pick is a past winner of the CBC Literary Award, a National Magazine Award, and the Bronwen Wallace Award. She served on the jury for the 2015 Giller Prize and has twice been a fellow at both Yaddo and MacDowell. Currently on faculty at the Humber School for Writers, Alison Pick lives and writes in Toronto.

Pick won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2005 for The Mind's Eye. The CBC Literary Prizes anthology, featuring the first-prize English-language winners from 2001 to 2006, was titled after her winning poem. She was a CBC Short Story Prize juror in 2012.

Pick told CBC Books about the inspiration behind Not in Their Names: "In 2018 I traveled to the West Bank. What I saw there forced me to reckon with the Israeli occupation and with my own potential complicity as a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors."

THE WEST BANK, OCCUPIED PALESTINE, 2018

I don't want to write about it, which means I should write about it.

I want to pretend I never went there.

After, I ran in the opposite direction, back to Tel Aviv where I got my nails painted red and ate brutally delicious and expensive charred eggplant and hummus.

"They call it Israeli food," Sami had said. "But it's Arabic food. It's food the Jews found here."

He doesn't know I am one of them.

I haven't told him, and I don't tell the young Israeli guard with an assault rifle strapped across her chest at the entrance to the historical site we are lining up to see. Yesterday, a Jewish tourist was pulled aside and not allowed to enter. She spent the afternoon being questioned.

What was she doing here, the soldiers wanted to know?

A white, Ashkenazi, Israeli Jew.

What am I doing here?

I remind myself I am allowed to be here, to bear witness. I'm Canadian. But for Israeli citizens, this would be illegal. They are forbidden entry into 'Area A' of the West Bank, the territories occupied by Israel at the end of the 1967 war. Their government does not want its own citizens to see what is happening here; what a military occupation looks and tastes and smells like.

The building we are lining up to visit is part mosque, part synagogue. It was divided after a religious Israeli settler massacred 29 Palestinians at worship in 1994. Muslims are now allowed access only on certain days; today isn't one of them.

Even as our tour guide, Sami can't come in.

It has started to rain, fat drops smacking down in the garbage-filled gutters. A wind comes up. Sami borrows a keffiyeh from a nearby shop to keep dry; the black and white headscarves are the most identifiable marker of the Palestinian solidarity movement. The Israeli guard takes exception with this blatant display of identity. She jabs her chin toward Sami, asking questions in fast Hebrew.

"No. Nobody here is Muslim," Sami answers, of our motley group of Westerners.

He looks at me. "Are you Muslim?"

He's guessed I'm Jewish, is daring me to say so.

The solidarity it would imply, that I am a Jew witnessing publicly what the Israeli soldiers are doing. But I am afraid. I shake my head rapidly, no.

How quickly I can be shamed into hiding who I am.

My grandparents came to Canada after the Holocaust, after their families had been killed. Why be Jewish? they wondered. They pretended they were Christian.

And my teenaged self abhorred this cowardice, this secrecy. But here, briefly, I understand the self-preservation at the heart of their hiding.

As if on cue, the soldier drags a scrawny Arab teenager from the line. He's wearing a ripped blue K-Way windbreaker and knock-off Nikes. He's whisked away, out of our sight.

A rugged Brit from our group asks Sami, "How long will they keep him?"

Sami shrugs. "Maybe an hour. Maybe a year."

"A year?"

"Who's going to say anything about it?"

I look around. There are Arabs — like prisoners — and there are Israeli guards. There are tourists.

"Did he have a gun?" one of them asks.

Sami smiles, like we are a group of sweet, slow kindergarteners. "No. If he had a gun they would have shot him."

More rain.

"He might be back in an hour," Sami repeats, like part of him wants to give us the hope that he cannot feel himself.

There's a couple from Texas in our group with their eight-year-old daughter. She has traveled to 20 countries in her short life. Her mother complains bitterly of the orphans who swarm around us now, begging. She kicks at them, stopping just short of their actual physical bodies.

The begging children have a handler who emerges from the shadows. He takes one of the tiny boys by his shoulders and pushes him forward, like evidence in court. "He's a good boy. A Christian boy!" he says, indignant.

"You should have seen the beggars in Morocco," the young daughter tells me, shaking her head at the travesty.

Sami's family lives in the Aida refugee camp. In the afternoon we say goodbye to the rest of the group and drive to his house for lunch. The short distance takes us triple the time because we are not permitted to use the faster, efficient roads reserved for Israelis; Palestinians can only access poorer and more circuitous routes.

"You expected tents," Sami says when he first shows me the refugee camp.

I nod.

"But we've been here 70 years! So we've built homes."

They are piled onto each other, like apartment buildings made from Lego, the top floors dangling precariously so that it seems any moment the whole thing will crumble.

"We renovated," Sami says proudly. "I'm married now."

"Any kids?"

"I just got married!" he laughs. We laugh together.

We look over and see a toddler, maybe three years old, in the street. He is clutching a blue plastic gun. The only Jews he has ever seen are soldiers.

All Israelis do military service after high school, so the guards stationed here are 17 or 18 years old. Sami says if they have a bad day with their parents, a break-up, they will close the gate to the camp for a week. It is offhand, thoughtless, an easy way for them to take out the stress of adolescence.

Except, there are people in the camp who need access to the hospital.

Except, there is limited drinking water; it's delivered intermittently, and if the gate is closed, the gate is closed.

In Sami's family home the floor is made of dirt. His mother cooks on a wood stove that emits an oily black smoke. She tells me Sami has been in jail for seven years without any charge, in solitary confinement for months at a time. I can tell this is true because Sami refuses to discuss it.

He was married in jail. A glass wall between he and his bride.

Sami's father has bare feet and long yellow toenails, a headscarf. He eats his lunch with his hands. The stuffed cabbage leaves are delicious but my neuroses rear up; I look for cutlery.

In Auschwitz we would have licked the plate clean. We would have made soup with the spit from the Arab's beautiful hands.

Sami tells me more about the guards; in his broken English, he calls them not Israelis, but Isra-aliens. I imagine the narrator on a nature show on TV: At sunset, the Isra-aliens come down from their settlements and provoke the Palestinian children into throwing stones…

Once a stone is thrown, anything goes.

What do the Palestinians have but stones and rocks? Maybe rockets. Maybe they have weapons stockpiled in the scarf shop behind their old mosque where the Jews now pray.

I would too. I would too.

The fields around Sami's house reek of sewage. They are hemmed in by illegal Israeli settlements, communities of religious Jews who believe the land was given to them by God. The Israeli government provides massive tax incentives to Jews who live in the settlements, which have been strategically placed to prevent a contiguous Palestinian territory. The settlements are high on hills. Occasionally, the sewage pipes are opened. Down goes the detritus into the fields of the Arabs until they are knee deep in shit and piss.

Remember the little Jewish boys hiding from the Nazis in the latrines in Auschwitz?

Remember my great-aunt's children, herded onto the back of a flatbed and fed to the chimneys?

Am I being disloyal? A bad girl for asking questions?

Who is knee deep in shit now?

I have seen this occupation with my eyes, this gross violation of human rights. I would have done anything not to believe it, but I cannot take away what I have seen. I feel shame in my body, and fear of being a bad Jew; of being called a bad Jew for talking about it. I do not want to be cast out by my hard-won Jewish community.

Aren't Jews supposed to ask questions?

On the drive back after lunch in the refugee camp, we pass an entire field of stumps.

"Our olive trees," Sami says. "Cut down."

He doesn't say by who.

To be in the West Bank is to see an untenable balance of power, one that is creating the very conditions of terrorism itself.

Here, everything is labelled, segregated.

The soldiers know a car is Arab because the license plate marks it.

They knew a child was Jewish because of the star sewn on his jacket.

My bus back to Jerusalem is packed with young Arab women. They are students, 17 or 18, the same age as the soldiers. The girl beside me has her phone out, texting. I see an eggplant, a smiley face with tears. LOL.

We drive alongside the separation wall.

The Israelis have built it to prevent suicide bombings; in practice, it divides the Palestinians, separating the Arab East Jerusalem from Bethlehem to the south and Ramallah to the north.

At the checkpoint, the bus slows, then stops. The young women file off. I get up to follow.

"No, not us," an American aid worker whispers to me urgently.

To which 'us' does she think I belong?

Through the grimy bus window, I watch the Arab women line up. Their headscarves are maroon or brown or black. There are 30 or 40 of them, and two Israeli guards, but the guards have guns so two is all it takes. The female soldier takes her place at the head of the line, waves the tip of her rifle to show how her captives should stand.

The Arab girls present their papers to her one by one. Will they be allowed back on board? Allowed to get to where they're going?

The passengers file back on; I smile but they won't catch my eye.

Then the soldier boards the bus for the rest of us.

I think of my grandmother on her way out of Prague when the Nazis halted the train, demanding to see papers. The terror she must have felt. Here — in Nablus, Bethlehem, Ramallah — it is the Jews I'm afraid of. The soldier jostles her gun, to remind us — and her — she has it. I've done nothing wrong. But what is a nice Jewish girl doing here?

Language matters. Do not let the guard hear me say Palestine.

There is no 'J' for Juden on the passport I hold out to the soldier in a shaky hand. There is no 'I' for Israelite. My interrogator is of my own tribe — but there is no mercy in her eye.

She has curly brown hair, acne. She smirks, and snaps my passport closed.

The relief at crossing that checkpoint and sailing all the way to West Jerusalem, and later to the Jewish city of Tel Aviv. An oasis of capitalism. I recognize capitalism. I want to spend money to be absolved of what I have seen.

Cocktails.

A manicure.

My toes too, while you're at it.

The long, curled toenails of Sami's father.

The long history of his people's suffering.

My people, too, have suffered beyond imagination, but this occupation cannot fix the Holocaust. My murdered family would not want more pain inflicted on another people in their names. What can I do to stop this? What can I do to honour them?

My mouth is choked with fear. But I can write.

The winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025 and the CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2025.