An Impossible Friendship – Conversation with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

Jacqueline Wagner in conversation with Sonja Mejcher Atassi

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the recipient of the 2021 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar Lüst Research Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange and the 2008 Annemarie Schimmel Research Award. In 2017/18, she was an invited resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg/Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2005 and her MA from the Free University of Berlin in 2000. She is the author of An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia University Press 2024), Reading across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (Reichert 2012), and Geschichten über Geschichten: Erinnerung im Romanwerk von Elias Khoury (Reichert 2001), as well as the co-editor of The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books (Skira 2016), and Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Ashgate 2012).

Jacqueline Wagner: In your recently published book “An Impossible Friendship: A Group Portrait, Jerusalem before and after 1948”, you paint the picture of a diverse group of friends, an “ecumenical circle”, who were able to come together in a certain place at a very specific time in history, but then had to part ways after a historical caesura. Could you briefly explain who these friends were and how you, as a literary scholar, came to illuminate this friendship in a multidisciplinary approach in a sort of group biography?

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi: An Impossible Friendship focuses on a “small ecumenical circle” of five friends, young men and women who came together in Jerusalem before 1948 across religious lines, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. At the time, they were all aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals. The men did later become important cultural figures – outside Palestine/Israel. The women, like so many women of their generation around the world, did not step into public spotlight.

The book cover shows a photograph of the friends sitting together, dating back to 1945 or 1946. Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916–1991), seated in the center, was the only Jewish member of the group. He was born in Hamburg – the city I grew up in – into a middle-class German family who left for Palestine in 1933, as the Reichstag fire trials were broadcast on the radio. Critical of political Zionism, he returned to Europe in 1946, first to London, and from there to Germany where he worked as an interpreter in the Nuremberg Trials, before he settled in Switzerland. He gained recognition in post-war German language literature as a playwright, novelist, biographer of Mozart, and a member of the influential literary circle Gruppe 47. Wolfgang is flanked by Sally and Walid to his right, and Rasha and Jabra to his left. Sally Kassab (1920–1998), was born to Greek Orthodox parents in Beirut but grew up with her mother’s family, the Hananias, in Jerusalem and in England. She and Wolfgang were known in the ecumenical circle as a couple, but Sally would later marry a British diplomat and Wolfgang would wed a German painter. Seated next to Sally, at the far left, is Walid Khalidi (1925–), a pipe in his mouth. He hails from an old and distinguished Jerusalemite Muslim family. His father, Ahmad Samih al-Khalidi, was the principal of the Arab College, the highest Arab educational institution in Palestine, on whose premises the photograph was taken. Walid would go on to become a towering figure in Palestinian historiography, diplomacy, and institution building. He married Rasha Salam (1922–2004), seated between Wolfgang and Jabra, her unruly hair cut short. She came from one of the most important political families of Lebanon, which championed Arab nationalism and women’s emancipation. Seated at the right end is Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–1994), wearing, like the other men in the picture, a suit and tie, a pipe in his left hand. He was born into a Syriac Christian family in the region of Adana, from where his family fled to Palestine during the Franco-Turkish War in 1922. He grew up in poverty in Bethlehem but enjoyed significant social mobility through education as a Palestinian student, having obtained scholarships that enabled him to study at the Arab College in Jerusalem and then the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge in the UK. After 1948, he played a major role in Baghdad’s cultural life and the formation of Arab modernism as a literary writer, art critic, and translator of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Faulkner.

I learned about this group of friends by chance. I was researching the life and work of Jabra, when my colleague, the historian Tarif Khalidi, told me that I should meet his half-brother, Walid Khalidi, who was friends with Jabra in Jerusalem. It was Walid who told me about this group of friends, and he referred me to an article he wrote about Albert Hourani in which he briefly described them as a “small ecumenical circle” which Albert would join from time to time for drinks at the bar of the King David Hotel. Intrigued by this story, I decided to research this group of friends and write a group biography.

I draw on literary studies and the social sciences, and more precisely life writing and microhistory. In the end, I use this group portrait as a lens to shed light on a larger picture – to read what is usually referred to as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that make room for the complexities of real-life stories and intimacies. This allowed me to draw a more personalized picture and to contextualize what media coverage usually reduces to bits and pieces of information ready to be consumed along dominant political ideologies. Following the life trajectories of my friends – they did become my friends in the process of researching and writing this book – enabled me to read together what is not usually read together, the Holocaust and the Nakba, not in comparison but in conversation as linked, entangled histories in search of “a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples”.[1] (

Jacqueline Wagner: Your book, which can be read as approach to a collective biography, seems to be in line with a current trend within the humanities to put the focus on actors. At the same time, however, storytelling’s omnipresence in academia, economy and society is also being criticized, with political lines being lost and as an expression of growing diffuseness: some even talk of a crisis of narration. How do you explain the narrative trend and how would you respond to its critics?

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi: That’s a good question. I believe in the power of storytelling because stories connect us as human beings, move us, and motivate us to feel empathy and engage in practices of solidarity in a world we share. And in the specific context of Palestine, stories matter because they put names and faces to a history that all too often has been reduced to numbers. Storytelling also opens our eyes to fiction, the fiction of what has been recorded as history as well as the fiction that literary writers produce to make us see what has remained unrecorded as history. In the end it is about “The Permission to Narrate,” as Edward Said points out. Storytelling does not exist in a void, whose stories are told and whose are not, and by whom, are political questions.

In the book you refer to in your question, Byung-Chul Han draws on Walter Benjamin to make his point that in today’s consumer society storytelling is storyselling. As he says, we are blind to other narratives, perceptions, and realities. In An Impossible Friendship, I, too, draw on Benjamin, and in particular his essays “The Storyteller” and “The Task of the Translator,” to foreground the importance of past real-life experiences. My book opens with the King David Hotel bombing on 22 July 1946, a momentous terrorist attack carried out by the Irgun. It was this terrorist attack that, symbolically speaking, made friendship impossible. In part one, I reconstruct in fragments a world forever lost, reimagining what brought the group of friends together in Jerusalem. In part two, I trace the afterlives of their friendship, attempts at reconnecting in different geographical and temporal settings and under new historical circumstances.

The stories I tell in An Impossible Friendship are grounded in archival research and closely interwoven with critical reflections on the gaps and silences we encounter in archives. I think we need to think these together, archival research, critical reflections, and storytelling. Jille Lepore tells us that historians need to strike a balance between intimacy and distance: historians who get too close to their subjects—who “love too much”—run the risk of trespassing into biography. As a cultural historian trained in literary studies, I am not afraid to trespass into biographical writing. I embrace the risk of loving too much, getting too close to my book’s subjects. I thus refer to them by their given names.

Jacqueline Wagner: You describe the Jerusalem of 1948 as a cosmopolitan city in the age of interdependence, the five friends with their diverse biographies as transnational identities who met at the Arab College. The Arab College was certainly an elite institution, and to a large extent part of the British colonial structure. Conflicts about the future of Palestine were already existing since the foundation of the Arab College in 1918. How did the friends position themselves in terms of class, nation and religion?

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi: The Arab College was not an elite institution. It was the highest Palestinian Arab educational institution at the time, but admission was based on merit. It brought together the best Arab students from across Palestine, many from rural background. It really was a unique and progressive institution, bringing together Arab-Islamic heritage with Western classical and liberal traditions. It was founded in 1918 as the Teachers’ Training College, and many of its graduates went on to play important roles in the Palestinian national struggle, primarily in the field of education. Before Ahmad Samih al-Khalidi, it was headed by the Palestinian educators Khalil al-Sakakini and Khalil Totah. Both had resigned due to political disputes with the British colonial authorities: al-Sakakini in 1920 to protest the appointment of Herbert Samuel, an avowed Zionist, as Britain’s first High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan; Totah in the wake of demonstrations in 1925 that were triggered by the invitation of Arthur Balfour – after whom the 1917 Balfour Declaration is named which promised British support for the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people – to speak at the opening of the Hebrew University, in which a significant number of the students from the Arab College participated.

There were plans to turn the Arab College into a university, but these plans never materialized. They were cut short, similar to how the development of Jerusalem as “a city of considerable social mobility, of ethnic diversity, and of communal conflict … tempered by a fair amount of mutual dependence and local solidarities,” as Salim Tamari describes it, was cut short in 1948.

The circle of friends at the heart of An Impossible Friendship were of diverse social background. Jabra and Walid came from the far ends of Palestinian society. Jabra grew up in poverty as a newcomer – his family arrived in Bethlehem as refugees, having fled the Franco-Turkish War in the region of Adana. Walid hailed from an old and distinguished Jerusalemite family. Jabra experienced social mobility through education. All five were steeped in British colonial lifestyles. English was their lingua franca, they read English Romantic poetry and were infatuated with modernist trends, especially Jabra and Wolfgang. The group picture on the book cover shows Wolfgang sitting like a dandy between Rasha and Sally, Walid and Jabra, each holding a pipe, look like British intellectuals.

Religion played a role in their lives only as part of their cultural background, and Jerusalem as the city where the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have coexisted for hundreds of years brought these cultural backgrounds together in one and the same place.

Jacqueline Wagner: What were the difficulties you had to face in your search for the friends’ traces who were forced to take different directions after 1948? How do you deal with absence, silence and gaps in the archive?

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi: My research has not been without difficulties, challenges, and surprises, and I believe this is partly what research is all about. It pushes us to halt, think, rethink, and start again. Living and working in Beirut, I was investigating the life trajectories of individuals who came together in Jerusalem before 1948, but each life took me in different directions: some had their beginnings in different locations—Adana, Hamburg, and Beirut—and all continued out of Palestine after 1948—in Germany, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. Wolfgang’s life is the best documented given that his private papers have been preserved and are today archived in the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In the Middle East, and especially in Palestine, the situation of archives is very different. There are few state archives, and those that exist are often poorly equipped and lack access. Jabra’s house in Baghdad, which served as a repository of his personal library, private papers, and some of his paintings well after his passing, was destroyed in 2010, in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War. Palestinian archives are as dispersed as Palestinians themselves, and many collections were destroyed, others were looted in 1948 and are today housed in Israeli state archives. Back in 2018, Lila Abu Lughod edited a special issue for Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on “Palestine: Doing Things with Archives” with contributions by Sherene Seikaly and Ann Laura Stoler, which outlines some of these difficulties.

My research journey took me to many different archives, public and private archives. I draw on diaries, correspondences, and photographs, many hitherto unpublished, and other ephemera. I also draw on the writings of my book’s subjects, including works of fiction. In addition, I make use of oral history, personal interviews I conducted with Walid Khalidi, the only member of the “small ecumenical circle” who is still alive, and other people who still remember the “small ecumenical circle of friends” in Jerusalem.

It was important for me to mark gaps and silences in the archive, and not to brush them aside as if we were able to fill them, as if no crimes were committed that led to their destruction and dispersal. I learned a lot from reading Saidiya Hartman’s work. Gaps and silences can speak much louder than attempts at overwriting them. We have to learn to read histories filled with gaps and silences. We cannot force everything into one master narrative; rather we should learn to read different narratives, in this case Jewish/Israeli and Arab/Palestinian histories together as part and parcel of an entangled, if at times contradictory, history.

Jacqueline Wagner: Our present time is characterised by a growing tension between globalisation, networks and interdependence and a simultaneously increasing polarisation. Ecumenical friendship perhaps is an anachronistic characterisation that says more about today than about the past you describe. What do you think can an ecumenical friendship as you outline teach us today, and how and where can or does it exist?

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi: I like to think that An Impossible Friendship is as much about our present and future as it is about the past. Reading about Palestine before 1948 today matters because that history is still a battlefield, because the Nakba of 1948 did not end in 1948 but continues today; it is an Ongoing Nakba. The history of Israel/Palestine has gone hand in hand with a politics of dispossession, as Edward Said so aptly said. Yet within and alongside this fraught history, coexistence remains a possibility. This is what pushed Said and Barenboim to work together and co-found the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Weimar, then the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin – or, to take a more recent example, what brought Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor together to film No Other Land (Palestine/Norway 2024), a documentary that had its world premiere at the Berlinale this year.

In the early 1980s, forty years after they met in Jerusalem, Rasha started a correspondence with Wolfgang. After the Israeli invasion and Siege of Beirut in 1982, she and Walid had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Walid was teaching at Harvard and Rasha embarked on writing her memoirs. Disillusioned with Germany and its failure to come to terms with its Nazi past, Wolfgang had moved to Switzerland. In an exchange of letters, which today are preserved in the Academy of Arts in Berlin, Rasha and Wolfgang gave new life to their friendship, reminiscing about their shared lives back in Palestine under the British Mandate while sharing bits and pieces of their lives in exile, sending their love to Walid and Sylvia (Wolfgang’s wife) respectively. In one of his last letters to Rasha, in 1989, Wolfgang writes, “Silvia and I would like to become Arabs.” Aware of the impasse of identity politics one year into the First Intifada, he wishes to overcome representations of Arabs and Jews as disparate and opposed communities, invented first and foremost by European colonialism.

I felt there was an urgency to telling the story of An Impossible Friendship because the individual lives depicted in my group portrait are being lost—literally disappearing from visibility against the background of current developments in the Middle East (and elsewhere – also in Germany), where diversity is dealt with as a threat and ideologies of one religion, one people, and one language dominate the politics of the day, as in the Basic Law passed by the Knesset in 2018 which defines Israel as an exclusively Jewish nation-state. Of course this feeling of urgency has only increased since October 7, Hamas’s unprecedented terrorist attack and the horrors we witness unfolding in front of our very eyes in Gaza today, downplayed by international media as the Israel-Hamas war but ruled by the International Court of Justice as plausible of violating the Genocide Convention. What can An Impossible Friendship teach us today? I am not sure it can teach us anything, but it can share past experiences that enable us to imagine a better future in which genuine friendship, justice for all, and peaceful coexistence is possible. Inscribed in the impossibility of an impossible friendship is the possibility of friendship.

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Footnotes

[1] (Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (eds.), The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press 2019), https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-holocaust-and-the-nakba/9780231182973).

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Jacqueline Wagner works at the Forum Transregionale Studien and is part of the TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research’s editorial team.

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Citation: An Impossible Friendship – Conversation with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 01.08.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/124em

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