Forgotten - by Raja Shehadeh & Penny Johnson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A profound meditation on memory and the preservation of Palestinian heritage, from the award-winning author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.

Forgotten uncovers the hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine--now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories--and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on the small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

From ancient city ruins to the Nabi 'Ukkasha mosque and tomb, acclaimed writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialized, and what lies unseen, abandoned, or erased--and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or at the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land.

In elegiac, elegant prose, Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba--the 1948 catastrophe for Palestinians--but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today.

Review Quotes

"An illuminating and poignant journey through Palestine's past and present...a tender and undeterred love letter to a contested land." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Shehadeh...has long been a voice of sanity and measure in the fraught, tendentious world of Arab-Israeli politics...engaged, forensic, alert to history's weight but unwilling to let it crush him...I thought of WG Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape...Shehadeh's books are like beacons held up against the darkness of Israeli oppression. Forgotten is perhaps the brightest light of all." --The Observer

"A heartbreaking, hopeful look at how Palestinian culture endures in spite of the occupation and the Israeli government's attempts to remove all traces of it from the land that they 'share unequally.'" --Irish Times

"This precious jewel of a book is a call to preserve the past in order to secure the future. Its hauntingly evocative prose stays with you long after its final pages have been turned." --Middle East Eye

"Part travelogue, part historical recounting, the slim but profound book follows Shehadeh and Johnson...as they venture out from their home in Ramallah, in the West Bank...The argument that the erasure of Palestinian villages and historical sites is an attempt to divorce Palestinians from both their cultural memory and their historical connection to the land is not a new one. Shehadeh and Johnson's search, however, manages to show, rather than tell, just how effective that erasure has been." --New Statesman

"An elegiac journey...in seeking some of Palestine's most unusual, unknown, and uncared-for sites, [Shehadeh and Johnson] provide a fresh account of a land described by so many others...a valuable record of Palestine, as told by two eloquent and erudite observers." --Markaz Review

Praise for Raja Shehadeh:

"Palestine's greatest prose writer." --The Observer

"Shehadeh is a great inquiring spirit with a tone that is vivid, ironic, melancholy, and wise." --Colm Tóibín

"Raja Shehadeh is a buoy in a sea of bleakness." --Rachel Kushner

About the Author

Raja Shehadeh is one of Palestine's leading writers. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. Shehadeh is the author of several acclaimed books including Palestinian Walks, which won the prestigious Orwell Prize, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? and A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle.

Penny Johnson is a founding member of the Institute of Women's Studies at Birzeit University and has published articles and edited a number of important books on Palestine. She is also a contributing editor to Jerusalem Quarterly and the author of Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine.