Memory
Bethlehem, Jericho & a view of Jerusalem
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A Palestinian writer mentally retreats to three unreadable cities.
How to abandon an archive
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When an authoritarian regime collapses, what happens to the archives of its secret police?
The size of longing
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On Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine and Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment
Forget your darlings
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On memory palaces, medieval and modern. A medieval woman’s life would not have taken the form of a straight line.
The pulverization of memory
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Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
A Silence Shared
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« If a story just like that one — dying babies, divine retribution — had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. »
When the world makes rags of us
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He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
« When I was silent… » — Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
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Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. It is a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.
Two palindromes
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→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
The room I am in
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Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
Planes, tanks & automobiles
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You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
All is not vanity
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Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?