Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

disappeared to walk the holy city by himself.

grew his hair out and beg...

disappeared alt...

King Hezekiah, in the year 700 b.c., ordered his men to build a tunnel in Jerusalem to bring water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam.

winter of 2010, two Palestinian ornithologists went on a field trip into the scrublands halfway between Gilo and Beit Jala.

late morning, several shots were fired

tall, thin settler, Mark Kovack, was arrested after a tip-off.

In the summer of 1932,

Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud.

Einstein praised the Austrian’s devotion to the internal and external liberation of m...

The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud

possible to guide the psychological development of humankind

resistant to the psychoses of hate an...

delivering civilization from the hovering...

In his eventual reply—which

Freud said

in his opinion there was not much likelihood of anyone being able to suppress humanity’s ...

It is easy to infect mankind with war fever, and humanity has an active instinct fo...

What was ...

a central authority that would have the last word in every co...

anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevit...

had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mytholog...

Immediately on release from the concentration camp in Auschwitz, Yitzak Elhanan Gold was given a ticket to travel on a ship to Tel Aviv along

Yitzak was injured in the war of ’48

adopted, at the hospital, by a family who had lived in the city for six generations.

he never spoke to his children about his experiences du...

until decades...

he was asked by Smadar for a school gene...

What fascinated Smadar most about her grandfather’s story

well-dressed man had slipped Yitzak a piece of seedcake at the train station in Gyor. The cake was wrapped in a piece of newspaper.

he unfurled the n...

bottom corner, an advertisement for the film ...

he kept the piece of newspaper

through his days in the camp.

The most excellent jihad is that for the conquest of self.

Why would he not study the Nakba instead of the Holocaust?

It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

Knowing others. Diversity

Persian poet, Rumi:

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

Clever vs Wise

Steven Spielberg knew—even

history is in constant acceleration, but sooner or later a force, any force, must hit a curve: that curve, then, is a story that must be told.

If you divide death by life you will find a circle.

There was always somebody who would know somebody. Nobody in Israel lived unbombed.

even in his haste there was a quietness to Bassam.

The deaths occurred ten years apart: Smadar in 1997, Abir in 2007.

On the back of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s silver compass

an inscription from the Qur’an: Travel through the earth and see what was the end of those who rejected Truth.

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.

At the World Peace Congress in 1949, Pablo Picasso unveiled a drawing of a dove carrying an olive branch in its mouth.

immediately became a universal symbol of opposition to war.