Sonja Mejcher-Atassi Recommends Books on Palestine in 20th Century Literature
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi recently joined us in our podcast studio in Beirut to discuss her book "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948," which details the relationship between a group of friends (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Walid Khalidi, Rasha Salam, Sally Kassab and Wolfgang Hildescheimer) who came together at a momentous time in the modern history of Palestine. We asked Sonja for a reading list from each of the members whom she calls her “famous five” that feature in her book.
Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876–1948
Written by Walid Khalidi
“This book takes you on a visual journey into Palestine before 1948. Every important aspect of Palestinian society comes to life in nearly 500 photographs.” (via Palestine Studies)
Sonja: "A key resource and visual journey into Palestinian history brought to life in photographs from private and public collections across the world and in brief analytical texts, situating the photographs in time, place, and historical context.”
A short video about this book can be found here.
The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood
Written by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra & translated into English. by Issa J. Boullata
“An engaging autobiographical account of Jabra’s boyhood in Bethlehem, where he was born in 1920, and later in Jerusalem, where he moved as a teenager with his parents. Through the eyes and heart of a sensitive, highly imaginative boy, Jabra describes the first sources of his artistic sensibility—the houses, fields, and orchards of his childhood and the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. ” (via University of Arkansas Press)
Sonja: “One of the most beautiful autobiographies, describing Jabra’s childhood in Palestine, which constitutes, at the same time, a chapter in the biography of Palestine before 1948.”
Available via University of Arkansas Press
Tynset
Written by Wolfgang Hildesheimer
“Tynset takes place during a sleepless night, but as the work unfolds it becomes apparent that the circumstances of the immediate present serve merely as points of departure. Plagued by incessant rumination, the narrator’s restless mind spins thread after thread of thought, fantasy, and memory into an elaborate tapestry spanning centuries and covering thousands of miles―all without the narrator ever leaving his house. Hildesheimer famously refused to describe Tynset as a novel; instead, he chose to think of the work as an extended monologue whose structure derives from the musical rondo form, with the recurrence of the titular Norwegian town functioning as a refrain.” (via Dalkey Archive Store)
Sonja: “One of Hildesheimer’s most celebrated novels, taking place in a sleepless night, usually read in the context of German Jewish exile literature.”
Available via Dalkey Archive Press
Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist: The Life and Activism of Anbara Salam Khalidi
Translated into English by Tarif Khalidi
“Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist is the first English translation of the memoirs of Anbara Salam Khalidi, the iconic Arab feminist. At a time when the effects of the revolution and counterrevolution of the Arab Spring loom heavy over Middle Eastern politics, this book brings to life an earlier period of social turmoil and women's activism through one remarkable life.” (via Pluto Press)
Sonja: “An intimate record of Anbara Salam Khalidi’s life and the social and political transformations she witnessed in Lebanon and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.”
Available via Pluto Press
The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History
Edited by Bashir Bashir & Amos Goldberg
“In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. It searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections.” (via Lighthouse Bookshop)
Sonja: “Reading the Holocaust and the Nakba not in comparison but in conversation as linked, entangled histories in search of a world of justice and equality to be created between the two people.”
Available via Columbia University Press
An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before & After 1948
Written by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi
“In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba?”
Available via Columbia University Press
