Memoirs from Israeli and Palestinian Communities

Author

Description

How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s fascinating saga, "Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets," recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton and her elusive, Yale-educated father, K. Harold Bolton. In the prefatory chapter, “Burn This,” Judy receives a thick letter from her father and conjectures...

2) Beautiful country: a memoir

Author

Wang, Qian Julie

Formats:

Book - Hardback, eAudiobook, Large Print - Paperback, RCC New - Book

Description

Click to view

"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters. "Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay." An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's...

3) Black, white, and Jewish: autobiography of a shifting self

Author

Walker, Rebecca

4) The color of water: a Black man's tribute to his white mother

Author

McBride, James

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook

Description

Click to view

Who was Ruth McBride Jordan? Not even her son knew the answer to that question until he embarked on a twelve-year journey that changed himself and his family forever. Born Rachel Deborah Shilsky, she began life as the daughter of an angry, failed orthodox Jewish rabbi in the South. To escape her unhappy childhood, Ruth ran away to Harlem, married a black man, became Baptist and started an all-black church. Her son James tells of growing up with

...

5) The drone eats with me: a Gaza diary

Author

Abu Saif, Atef

Description

Click to view

"An ordinary Gazan's chronicle of the struggle to survive during Israel's 2014 invasion of Gaza The fifty-day Israel-Gaza conflict that began in early July of 2014 left over 2,100 people dead. The overwhelming majority of the dead were Palestinians, including some 500 children. Another 13,000-odd Palestinians were wounded, and 17,200 homes demolished. These statistics are sadly familiar, as is the political rhetoric from Israeli and Palestinian authorities...

6) Giving up Is Not an Option: Memoirs of a Palestinian American

Author

Khoury, Hani Q

Description

Click to view

In his memoirs, Professor Hani Q. Khoury narrates the highlights of the complexities of his life and the events which have nurtured it. He was sentenced to an electric wheelchair at the age of 18 due to a progressive physical disorder. His story, like many others, is filled with challenges, setbacks, dreams, and, most importantly, hope. The juxtaposition of two very different cultural settings, Israeli-occupied Palestine, and the United States of...

7) Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation

Author

Shehadeh, Raja

Description

Click to view

In a dazzling mix of reportage, analysis, and memoir, the leading Palestinian writer of our time reflects on aging, failure, the occupation, and the changing face of Ramallah. In Going Home, Raja Shehadeh, the Orwell Prize-winning author of Palestinian Walks, takes us on a series of journeys around his hometown of Ramallah. Set in a single day-the day that happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank-the book is...

8) In the presence of absence

Author

Darw?sh, Mạhm?d

9) Inheritance: a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love

Author

Shapiro, Dani

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook

Description

Click to view

"The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she made last year about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden the story of her own life"--

10) A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba

Author

Alshaer, Atef

Formats:

eBook, Kindle

Description

Click to view

A Map of Absence presents the finest poetry and prose by Palestinian writers over the last seventy years. Featuring writers in the diaspora and those living under occupation, these striking entries pay testament to one of the most pivotal events in modern history - the 1948 Nakba.

This unique, landmark anthology includes translated excerpts of works by major authors such as Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani and Fadwa Tuqan alongside

...

11) Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir

Author

Sitta, Salman Abu

Description

Click to view

Salman Abu Sitta, who has single-handedly made available crucial mapping work on Palestine, was just ten years old when he left his home near Beersheba in 1948, but as for many Palestinians of his generation, the profound effects of that traumatic loss would form the defining feature of his life from that moment on. In this rich and moving memoir, Abu Sitta draws on oral histories and personal recollections to vividly evoke the vanished world of his...

12) Only hope: a survivor's stories of the holocaust

Author

Lubliner, Felicia Bornstein

13) People love dead Jews: reports from a haunted present

Author

Horn, Dara

Formats:

Book - Hardback, eAudiobook

Description

Click to view

"A startling exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster travelling exhibition called "Auschwitz," the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known "righteous-gentile" Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of...

14) Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy

Author

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

Description

Click to view

The word "shanda" is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense 20th-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit. In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of...

15) Shmuel's Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father

Author

Sommer, Jason

Description

Click to view

A moving memoir of a son's relationship with his survivor father and of their Eastern European journey through a family history of incalculable loss. Jason Sommer's father, Jay, is ninety-eight years old and losing his memory. More than seventy years after arriving in New York from WWII-torn Europe, he is forgetting the stories that defined his life, the life of his family, and the lives of millions of Jews who were affected by Nazi terror. Observing...

16) Summary of Edward W. Said's Out of Place

Author

Media, IRB

Description

Click to view

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 I have never known what language I spoke first, Arabic or English, or which one was really mine beyond any doubt. I have always spoken Arabic and English together, and they have always been connected in my life. #2 My mother, who was Palestinian, spoke English fluently. She had a classical Arabic accent, but she spoke English like a Shami, which is the collective...

17) They called me a lioness: a Palestinian girl's fight for freedom

Author

Tamimi, Ahed

18) When we were Arabs: a Jewish family's forgotten history

Author

Hayoun, Massoud

Formats:

Book, eBook

Description

Click to view

The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to...

19) Where the line is drawn: a tale of crossings, friendships, and fifty years of occupation in israel-palestine

Author

Shehadeh, Raja

Formats:

Book, eBook

Description

Click to view

"A moving account of one man's border crossings-both literal and figurative-by the award-winning author of Palestinian Walks, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War In what has become a classic of Middle Eastern literature, Raja Shehadeh, in Palestinian Walks, wrote of his treks through the hills surrounding Ramallah over a period of three decades under Israel's occupation. In Where the Line Is Drawn, Shehadeh explores how occupation...