Jerusalem in His Eyes

  Acknowledgements

My first thanks go to Mahmoud Shukair, whose warmth and promptness turned labour into conversation. His trust – answering carefully, correcting gently, and always keeping the dignity of others in view – made better criticism possible. I am equally grateful to Mr Saleh Abbasi, owner of Maktabat Kol Shee in Haifa, for generously granting me permission to reuse material from my Arabic book al-Quds fī ʿayneyhi: ḥiwāriyāt maʿa Mahmoud Shuqayr in the present volume.

  Introduction Setting the Stage

This book began where many reliable projects begin: at a small table, coffee cooling between questions, the city of Jerusalem standing just outside the window like a patient witness. The proposal we shaped that day was simple and exacting. Instead of hurrying from appointment to appointment, we would build a long conversation in writing. I would send questions in carefully sequenced clusters; Mahmoud Shukair would answer at his own pace. The exchange would trade spontaneity for depth, improvisation for reflection. When the first replies arrived – warm, prompt and precise – we knew the wager was sound. What followed was not a transcript but a working method: reflection first, elegance later.

Three lines soon revealed themselves and now guide the whole: place, endurance and form. Jerusalem is allowed to do its full work – no backdrop, but a living argument. Exile is not elegized; it is trained to teach patience and clarity. And form is treated as moral thought: small, exact shapes that respect experience without inflating it. A street, a loaf’s scent, a breeze off stone; a hunger strike; a child’s laughter; a widow’s shop. Each is allowed to carry more than itself – that is, to become literature.

The opening movement lays down the grain of a life. Birth in Jabal al-Mukabbir widens into neighbourhood, school, first work and the earliest sense of what a sentence can hold. The pages move at a humane pace. Anecdotes remain particular and lean outward; the ‘small particulars’ do the work of public memory. Nothing is announced as a thesis, and yet a thesis appears: a writer’s biography can be written without noise if attention is allowed to accumulate.

Next, absence is apprenticed to craft. The chain from cell to border to gate becomes a steadying frame for the long years in Amman and Prague. The point is not ordeal, but apprenticeship. Exile sharpens the ear, sandpapers the sentence and refuses the easy consolation of a slogan. Returned to Jerusalem, the writer keeps the discipline learned abroad: language as a slow instrument, not a blunt one. Writing here is both a survival map and a civic act.

A third movement changes the lens again; the oeuvre is read from the inside. Irony and tenderness sit side by side. Scenes do their quiet labour without pleading their case. ‘Vision’ does not mean escape; it means the double-seeing demanded of anyone who must love a place while acknowledging what has been done to it. The reading is technical in the best sense: how detail is placed, how dialogue is cut and how a paragraph learns to breathe.

What initially looks adjacent – writing for children and young adults – emerges as a second axis of responsibility. The classroom moves onto the page. Imagination becomes a tool of awareness. Humour is permitted; cruelty is not. Grief is acknowledged without crushing the reader. The ‘child within’ governs diction and design; national belonging is taught through the ordinary textures of a day – walks to school, neighbours’ shops and family kitchens – rather than through lecture. Ethics here is taught by cadence.

Another trajectory follows: translation as encounter. When a work leaves Arabic, the city tries to go with it. Sometimes it succeeds – cadence recreated, jokes retained, kinship terms respected; sometimes a single noun bends space the wrong way and a neighbourhood is misplaced by a preposition. From these crossings come editorial lessons: build glossaries, fix style notes, proof bilingually and keep the author in the loop when culture-bound terms are at stake. Translation is not a corridor; it is a second composition.

Midway, the project stops asking and starts listening – not to another interview, but to the texts themselves. The late autobiographical trilogy – Those Places, Those Times and A Final Margin – is read on its own terms as internally driven speech. Intention gives way to form. Place, time and threshold emerge as three axes; the craft of the very short story – compression, concrete detail, the quick turn and principled silence – bends to life writing so that fragments, vignettes and aphorisms can carry witness under constraint. Treating the books as autonomous work avoids the intention trap, enables triangulation with interviews and yields a self-contained roadmap future readers can cite without paratext. The tone is not manifesto but method: a late style that speaks plainly, lets form argue and turns the ordinary – school satchel, alley, hospital bell and grandchild’s laughter – into archival entries of a shared time. Reading is discipline; writing is answerability; testimony is built from units small enough to be credible and cumulative enough to endure.

From there, the focus turns to public conversation – not closure, but evidence. External interviews with Shukair are read as a sequence so that a poetics can be watched declaring itself across venues and years. Arranged chronologically, the dossier yields a micro-history. One extended profile supplies the grammar of the late prose – Jerusalem as a field of action, the family cycle as a way to keep witnesses present and intertext as an economy of suggestion. A later exchange states the programme with unusual clarity: literature should build an ‘artistic reality parallel to the raw real’, carried by cadence, scene and habit rather than by documentary accumulation or slogan. Another conversation provides the tooling: micro-fiction as an operating system for larger forms, a connected/discrete architecture that lets a book read as a whole while each unit stands alone, editorial ethics for preparing prisoners’ manuscripts and a publishing geography that explains how a Jerusalem-rooted idiom acquires Mediterranean reach. Read together, these interviews triangulate text, self-report and public persona; they also preserve the small facts of making and circulation – serialization, presses, translators and late rereadings – that anchor interpretation in the infrastructures of a literature that travels.

The closing movement is terse by design. A compact covenant is offered in one line: write close to the ground, let place instruct the prose, trust the reader’s intelligence and keep the art parallel to the raw real. The reader will already have seen the line enacted; now, it is said aloud. The book stops where it began – close to the table close to the city – only with the added steadiness that comes from having walked the circuit.

Behind the sequence sits a straightforward methodology. Criticism is kept text-proximate and historically grounded at once. Close reading is joined to documentary patience. Interviews and paratexts serve as evidence that can confirm, complicate or correct. The aim is a closed evidentiary loop in which claims about form, voice and ethics meet corroboration – or friction – in more than one register. The method is quiet; its payoff is clarity.

The goal, at the level of argument, is equally plain. Form is moral thought: small, exact units can preserve memory where grand narratives fray; cadence can carry history without blunting it; a well-made scene can move a reader further than a manifesto. Place is an instrument, not a backdrop: some cities – Jerusalem above all – demand to be treated as sites of argument where detail does historiography and where the ordinary is allowed to become witness.