Hosted by Rasha Elass
Featuring Sonja Mejcher-Atassi
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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The picture that adorns the front cover of Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s book “An Impossible Friendship” seems unassuming enough. Five friends look directly into the camera in the grounds of the Arab College in Jerusalem in the mid-1940s.
“This group picture serves as a lens to shed light on a much larger picture, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing Nakba,” Mejcher-Atassi tells New Lines’ Rasha Elass. “My book is as much about our present and our future as it is about the past. We know that what is happening today, there is a context for this, and this goes back 75, if not more years, and I think it’s very important to go back to this context and to look at the everyday also.”
“My book is as much about our present and our future as it is about the past.”
The choice to focus closely on these personalities was a very deliberate one for Mejcher-Atassi. “I don’t want to say I’m fed up with history, but I think we do need more names and faces and personal stories,” she adds.
On top of the characters, Mejcher-Atassi wanted to focus on the relationship between them. “Friendship is something that in scholarship has been somewhat left out,” she says. “We don’t usually talk about it, we don’t look into it.”
That’s not to say the process of writing a biography of multiple people was easy, says Mejcher-Atassi. “Deciding to write a group biography, we make choices. There are things we zoom in on and there are things we leave out. … Life writing is fascinating but it comes with a lot of challenges.”