The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem

Born in Jerusalem on February 25, 1929, during the British Mandate of Palestine, the author, Issa Boullata, a prominent Palestinian scholar, writer and translator of Arabic literature living in Montreal, shares with us a memoir of his childhood living in Jerusalem in the years before the Nakba in 1948. According to Boullata: “No year is burnt into the memory of the Palestinians as deeply and as painfully as 1948.” However, despite all the tension that preceded the Nakba, Boullata paints a vivid, beautiful, and unique image of what it was like to be a boy in Jerusalem between 1929 and 1948 in a skilfully written memoir that is such a light read it leaves the reader hungry for more.

Read the full review on the Palestine Book Awards website.