As I began reading this book, I remembered what Pico Iyer, a wonderful travel writer, said about Jerusalem: “I would never call Jerusalem beautiful, or comfortable or consoling. But there’s something about it that you can’t turn away from.” I wonder if Paola Caridi felt the same way. Did she also find in Jerusalem something that she would never forget?
Born in Italy, Caridi is a journalist who specializes in the Middle East and North Africa. After a two-year stay in Cairo, from 2001-2003, she left for Jerusalem where she lived for ten years. In 2013, Caridi’s portrait of Jerusalem was released in Italian and was this year published in English, under the title “Jerusalem without God: Portrait of a Cruel City.” The English translation was published by The American University in Cairo Press.
Caridi found the ten years she spent in Jerusalem to be the most demanding of her life. When she bade farewell to Jerusalem, she wrote that she felt no nostalgia or regret. She felt nothing until, months later, she heard the Muslim call to prayer in Sicily.
“Those words… roused in me the sweet taste of nostalgia, the soothing sense of nostalgia. Suddenly, I discovered with a resonant flash that I did not regret the streets of Jerusalem, the sacred stones, the dazzling white of its historical architecture and the artificiality of its present architecture… I missed the rhythms of the day,” Caridi wrote.
“The call to prayer has been so precious to me that, even now when I am no longer in Jerusalem, it takes me back to real time, time that is more consistent with a nature we have violated over the years and centuries,” she wrote.
This book, however, is not a complacent and lyrical description of Jerusalem. The author takes a hard look at the city. Nothing escapes her blunt judgment.
The visit to Jerusalem starts in the old quarter of Musrara in the company of 80-year-old Michel. His father, an accountant who worked for the British Mandate of Palestine, moved his family to the first mixed district, which was created outside the walls of the Old City.
As the mandate came to an end, the British thought it was necessary to divide the street in half to separate the adversaries. However, the situation reached a point of no return with the horrendous massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. This mass slaughter triggered the Palestinian flight from Jerusalem’s city center and the surrounding villages.
Michel and his family, like almost all of Musrara’s inhabitants, left their homes. They were replaced, between 1948-1964, with immigrant Jews who predominantly came from Europe.
Nowadays, more than 2000 people live in 610 lodgings, which more often than not consist of one single room. The public authorities allowed Musrara to fall into disrepair because the long-term plan was to drive the inhabitants to sell their old Arab houses. However, the inhabitants refused to leave and wanted to have a say in the renovation plans, which involved the challenge of restoring the traditional Arab houses. Musrara is now home to Orthodox Jewish families and a small community of international diplomats and journalists.
“Arab Musrara, like many parts of Palestinian Jerusalem, is today a remnant of what it used to be… It is like a fossil buried in stone, following that same historical path of the two parts of Musrara: The Israeli part, fully within the social changes of the country, and the Palestinian part, frayed and… without a new identity that could take the place of its ancient heritage. Arab Jerusalem is more and more split into tiny islands, compounds, enclaves and districts that have lost the connection to city life. The reasons, of course, lie in the conflict,” the author wrote.
Despite all these divisions and ill feelings, there are places, like Mega or Malcha Mall, which the author describes as “reconciled common space” were everybody meets. Israelis and Palestinians shop here because you pay less for more — they are united in their hunt for a bargain.
“The problem, if anything, is how to translate a common belonging into political and institutional terms,” Caridi wrote. For a growing number of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals, “the remedy is as simple as it is revolutionary: Jerusalem should be one and shared. That is, it should remain united and should be shared — one city for two communities.
“The idea of a city undivided and shared by its inhabitants springs exactly from the utter awareness of what takes place in the city. Daily life is, in fact, the primary indication that Jerusalem cannot be divided,” the author noted.
Speaking her mind with an open heart, Caridi gives the reader an in-depth look at a complex city and its daily dramas.
Book Review: Life in Jerusalem
Book Review: Life in Jerusalem
What We Are Reading Today: Sixty Miles Upriver
Author: Richard E. Ocejo
Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some 28,000 people located 60 miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley.
Like many similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents.
“Sixty Miles Upriver” tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in places where it unfolds in new ways.
What We Are Reading Today: A Death in the Rainforest
Author: Don Kulick
As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native Tayap, an endangered Papuan language.
“A Death in the Rainforest” takes readers inside the village, revealing what it is like to live in a place carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest.
This book offers insight into the impact of white society on the farthest reaches of the globe — and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village.
An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, the book takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Moon That Turns You Back’
- The book contains various poems, some experimental, some soaked in grief, some documenting the mundane, but always with a purpose. She perhaps sums it best when she writes: “I remember so you can forget”
Author: Hala Alyan
The first time I heard Palestinian-American artist Hala Alyan speak was when she acted in the starring role in Lebanese-American filmmaker Darine Hotait’s 2015 short film, “I Say Dust.”
In those 15 minutes of beautifully shot frames, you visually travel through time, space and various emotional states as Alyan leads the way.
Both Hotait and Alyan were deliberate in showcasing their Arab-centric stories of belonging and identity. Alyan’s fierce eyes were kind but intense on the screen; her movement was soft but firm and when she spoke, she left you speechless — but in the best way.
In the film, she was the epitome of poetry, and now you can explore Alyan’s words further with her latest work, a book of poetry titled, “The Moon That Turns You Back,” which was published in March this year.
For the past decade or so, Alyan has explored stories of complexities of identity and the impact of displacement, especially in relation to the Palestinian diaspora. In this latest collection, her writing takes us through Brooklyn, Beirut, Palestine and places that exist in between or in fragmented memories.
Alyan said that she does not have just one middle name, she has six, and not a single one of those are her mother’s. She writes evocative and concize lines such as “A city full of men still has a mother,” and “every time I tell the story, I warp it,” and her poetry is vividly descriptive with lines such as “lipstick like a sliced finger.” She also writes relatable lines such as “I’m terrible at parties, secrets and money,” and “a body is a calendar of breaths.”
The book contains various poems, some experimental, some soaked in grief, some documenting the mundane, but always with a purpose. She perhaps sums it best when she writes: “I remember so you can forget.”
Alyan is an adjunct assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University after earning her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University. She has also published several novels and well-received essays. She won the Arab American Book Award in 2013 and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2018.
What We Are Reading Today: Plankton: A Worldwide Guide
Authors: Tom Jackson & Jennifer Parker
“Plankton” are the unsung heroes of planet Earth. Passive drifters through the world’s seas, oceans, and freshwater environments, most are invisible or very small, but some are longer than a whale. They are the global ocean’s foundation food, supporting almost all oceanic life, and they are also vitally important for land-based plants, animals, and other organisms. “Plankton” provides an incomparable look at these remarkable creatures, opening a window on the elegance and grace of microscopic marine life.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Pox Romana’
Author: COLIN ELLIOT
In the middle of the 2nd century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt.
The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic.
