Sonja Mejcher-Atassi | An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before & After 1948
In this episode of This Is Not a Watermelon, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi joins us in our studio in Beirut to talk about her book "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948," which details the relationship between a group of friends who came together at a momentous time in the modern history of Palestine. The group, who Sonja calls her "famous five", features an extraordinary meeting of minds: Walid Khalidi, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Rasha Salam, Sally Kassab and Wolfgang Hildescheimer. The five straddle religious and cultural barriers to forge an unlikely friendship that becomes almost politically impossible after 1948. Learning about their friendship, we get snippets of life in Jerusalem during the British Mandate and other key moments in the country's history. We speak about how the bombing of the King David Hotel arguably marked a significant turning point for Palestine, and why it's important to read Palestinian and Israeli histories together considering how entangled they are.
This episode was recorded on July 10th, 2024.
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature in the Department of English and an associated faculty in the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature in global perspective, and closely intersects with cultural and intellectual history and memory studies. She is also interested in biography, writers' libraries, collecting practices and literature archives, book culture and art, and aesthetics and politics.
Connect with Sonja
About "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait Before & After 1948": Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Sonja demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal.
Learn more about the book
This Is Not a Watermelon
This podcast series is a celebration and documentation of Palestinian history and culture. We interview experts from various disciplines to help us better understand the facts about Palestine – the land and the people.