An Impossible Friendship - (Religion, Culture, and Public Life) by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (Paperback)

About the Book

In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. 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 postwar period.

Book Synopsis

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?

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, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, An Impossible Friendship unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice.

Review Quotes

Grounded in a Palestine that once was and spanning Beirut, Hamburg, Baghdad, Cambridge, Ambach, and Cairo, this brave and beautiful work traces an intimate circle of friends. As we travel time and space with Walid Khalidi, Sally Kassab, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Rasha Salam, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, we mourn their tragedies, just as the impossibility of their friendship invites us to imagine different futures.--Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

In this masterful book, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi retells the tragic history of the Middle East through the lens of a remarkable circle of friends, a group of brilliant young Christian, Muslim, and Jewish intellectuals torn apart by political violence. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, An Impossible Friendship strikes a delicate balance between empathy and distance, offering a poignant narrative that evokes both sadness for what Palestine could have been and hope for a different future.--Daniel Schönpflug, author of The World on Edge: The End of the Great War and the Dawn of a New Age

Through painstaking research and compelling narrative, Mejcher-Atassi has pieced together both a group biography of five of the most fascinating lives, Arab and Jewish, and an unforgettable portrait of a lost Jerusalem. An outstanding accomplishment and a remarkable book.--Eugene Rogan, author of The Arabs: A History

An outstanding work of biography and intellectual history. An Impossible Friendship draws on unpublished diaries and letters, as well as other original material, to unmask an intriguing web of relations between members of a close-knit intellectual circle in Jerusalem before 1948, when it was broken by war and ethnoreligious conflict.--Salim Tamari, author of The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine

About the Author

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2012), as well as coeditor of The Theatre of Sa'dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (2021), Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books (2016), and Archives, Museums, and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (2012).