The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904-1948

"I think this is the most extraordinary book about 20th century Jerusalem. It’s not very well known and the English translation has only recently come out. It’s the story of a lute player, Wasif. He is a character who bestrides the first fifty years of 20th century Jerusalem. He’s a Palestinian, who partied with the Ottoman elite during World War I and then, later, in his diary, bore witness to the increasing hostility and tensions that beset the city, right up to the outbreak of World War II , through that conflict and up to the War of Independence, when Israel became independent—the Nakba of the Palestinian people. The reason it’s such a wonderful diary and such a wonderful book is because he has such joie de vivre . He’s a musician. He’s a playboy and he parties. So you see a Jerusalem in this book which we’re just not used to. So often, we see a rather solemn Jerusalem, where you can only imagine everyone just praying and hating each other. He showed a completely different Jerusalem where there was playfulness. There were orgies, there were mistresses. There was a lot of sex going on. “The modern Jerusalem that we see today is probably the greatest it’s ever been as a city” It also brings to life a Palestinian world that you just never see. Jerusalem’s history is completely dominated by either the Jewish or the Palestinian national narratives. But he’s outside both of them. I really recommend this book to anybody who’s interested in the city and in the life of the city. It worked perfectly for me because in Jerusalem , I was trying to show not just the series of massacres, wars and conquests, but also a city that had music and food and dancing and love affairs and all that. I recommend it to everybody. It dazzles in its depictions of the different eras of Jerusalem, especially the Ottoman era, and the early 1920s, when the city was dominated by these Palestinian aristocratic families, the notable families, who are partying a lot. A lot of them are playboys and they’re all having love affairs. There are affairs with Jewish women and Arab women. There’s a great mixing. It changes so much. That’s the strange thing about Jerusalem and one of the reasons why it is such a fascinating subject. When you see Jerusalem on CNN or the BBC, it’s the holy city of three faiths. It’s the centre of the Middle East and a centre of war, conflict and tragedy. But, actually, Jerusalem has changed so much throughout its history. And the Jerusalem that Wasif starts writing about, of the early 1910s, of World War I and the early 1920s, is a very small, elegant city. It’s very different to that BBC/CNN city and not yet scarred by conflict. Of course, the city suffered a lot in World War I, but Wasif records a very different city. The Ottoman city was completely different from the city of the British mandate that came afterwards. And that was different from the city of 1948. He records about three or four different evolutionary periods of Jerusalem, which are all completely different from each other. That’s his genius. It’s certainly the greatest diary of Jerusalem life of the last few hundred years. No. He was an artistic character. He loves people and music and food. He likes girls and boys, which meant that he had access to everything in Jerusalem. He was interested in pleasure as well as nationality, identity and religion. In that sense, it’s a celebration of life that ends in the tragedy of the Nakba , which he describes in great detail. And, because we’ve known him since the early years of the century in a different world, you sympathize with him. It’s beautifully written. It’s a masterpiece and I don’t think he was even necessarily writing it for publication. He was an aesthete who loved life and culture and was interested in how people lived and how he lived and the things he’d seen. It’s hard to rave about it enough. When I first discovered it, when I was writing Jerusalem , I was just delighted by it and charmed, too. I’d love to have known him. He was a one of the great Jerusalemites and yet most people have never heard of him, even those who are fascinated by the Arab-Israeli conflict. Maybe we can change that with this conversation."