The Memoirs of My Jewish Great-grandfather: With "Reflections on the Fate of a Jew/Arab Family" and Appendix on the "Exodus of Palestinians in 1947-49"

by M.A. (Intro) AbuKhalil

Very good quality paperback, light shelf and handling wear only. Slight ink transference to inner cover both front and rear. Internally, pages are tightly bound, and text, photgraphs and drawings are clean and bright. CN

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2002

Reviews

[Emmaia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great part of this book is the author/editor's introduction, which is about the same length as the memoirs. (The memoirs themselves are pretty dull.) The author/editor describes the process of going to meet her family in Germany, her German relatives' relationship to her great-grandfather and the history of the war, her own thinking about how her great-grandfather's Jewishness put him in a position where he was pushed into helping the state implement capitalism, and other interesting observations. She's not hesitant to point out his flaws, but a it's also a sympathetic, human view of some really fraught history.

The fact that the author/editor is the progeny of a family that now includes displaced Palestinians makes it all the more historical and powerful.

This is a hard book to come by, and I would lend it to someone who wanted to read it, although I wouldn't part with it...