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The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. By Susan Slyomovics. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Pp. xxv + 294, illustrations, notes, bibliographical references, index.)
MARTHA NORKUNAS University of Texas
The Object of Memory is a deeply moving account of an exiled people's longing for their homeland. It is the story of Palestinian Ein Houd and Jewish Ein Hod, one village with two identities. It is a narrative about memory and how Arab and Jew locate images of a radically different past in a place that stands literally as home and metaphorically as homeland. A profound sense of loss permeates the narrative at every level. Susan Slyomovics captures one of the great tragedies of Palestinian and Jew just as the book begins. Palestinian memory, she writes, sanctifies the lost land as it was in the past and as it is in its present reality.Jewish memorial writing hallows a pre-World War II territory. She writes, "In their nostalgic yet anguished backward glances, these two groups maintain diametrically opposed attitudes toward the possibility-or impossibility-of an eventual return" (p. xiii). Can there be room for two groups, two histories ofloss, two nations building and rebuilding their senses of self on the same land?
Slyomovics began her study with volume 1 of the Destroyed Palestinian Village Series, the memorial book dedicated to the Palestinian Arab village of Ein Houd. There are three versions of Ein Houd/Ein Hod: the Palestinian memory of the pre-1948 Ein Houd, the post1953 Ein Hod as a Jewish artists' colony, and the new Palestinian Ein Houd al-Jadidah, built not two kilometers away from the original village.
Chapter 1 describes the effort of Palestinians to re-create, represent, and preserve a record of the pre-1948 Ein Houd through the texts and photographs that have come to be known as memory books. Slyomovics situates the Palestinian memory books in the larger genre of memorial books produced by those who have suffered war, dispersion, and traumatic loss as they strive to construct a nation, a community, and an endangered identity through the linking of memory and place. Again and again, a...