Forgotten: Searching for Palestine's Hidden Places and Lost Memorials [Paperback]

A profound meditation on memory and the preservation of Palestinian heritage, from the award-winning author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.

Forgotten uncovers the hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine—now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories—and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on the small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

From ancient city ruins to the Nabi 'Ukkasha mosque and tomb, acclaimed writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialized, and what lies unseen, abandoned, or erased—and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or at the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land.

In elegiac, elegant prose, Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba—the 1948 catastrophe for Palestinians—but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration today.“An illuminating and poignant journey through Palestine’s past and present…a tender and undeterred love letter to a contested land.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Shehadeh…has long been a voice of sanity and measure in the fraught, tendentious world of Arab-Israeli politics…engaged, forensic, alert to history’s weight but unwilling to let it crush him…I thought of WG Sebald as I read Forgotten. The resemblance lies not only in the mournful elegance of the prose but also in its method: a meditative excavation of history embedded in the landscape…Shehadeh’s bookló.