Text:

Because I love you I wish you three wishes:

1 - a pilot for a husband

2 - a car in the driveway

3 - a villa with no rent

A Palestinian girl's autograph book. Photo by Dana Hercbergs. [A color version of this figure can be viewed online at journals.cambridge.org/mes].

Autograph books (“memory books”) circulate among adolescent students, who fill their pages with dedications, memories, and wishes for the future. Although related genres like yearbooks and personal websites are replacing them, in East Jerusalem the tradition continues to evolve alongside newer media. In interviews with Palestinian women about the memories evoked by these keepsakes, I delve into the turbulent period of adolescence to explore such issues as friendship, romance, school, and home life. I treat autograph books as records of the changes that have occurred in Palestinian youth culture over the last fifty years and as catalysts for women's reflections about these changes.

The opening text appeared in a handful of autograph books belonging to thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students who were attending a Catholic Palestinian girls' school in Jerusalem in 2008. A variation of it is also displayed in the book of their guidance counselor, who graduated from the same high school in 1998. The recurring formula is found either embedded in the prose or concluding it at the end of the page.

The forward-looking sequence of events in a growing girl's life—typical of girls' folklore—combined with the status-oriented motifs of a pilot husband, a car, and a privately owned villa bear an intertextual relation to the lives of Palestinian girls. Juliana, an outspoken and vivacious sixteen-year-old from East Jerusalem, stated that girls from a young age are socialized to get married: “They [relatives] don't force them, but they start putting ideas in your head, so when you're sixteen, seventeen, you start to think about it.” Juliana has many male and female friends but no boyfriend; she doesn't think about marriage. “I want to get a job, car, house, then think about marriage.”

Consider this reversal:

Notice that the husband has changed places. A source of income in the formula text (and perhaps of freedom and travel, because he is a pilot), the husband is replaced by employment in Juliana's scheme, entering only after she has achieved a measure of financial and spatial independence. The car and house remain in the same position. Young Palestinians often drive a car before accumulating enough funds to move out, especially if they contribute to the family income prior to leaving home.

Although a structural comparison of these “texts” alone is insufficient to gauge societal trends, it does indicate an important tension: in general, Palestinian women who pursue higher education and careers still aspire to marry early. Those who do not marry continue to face the stigma of being incomplete, a girl (bint) rather than a woman.Footnote ¹ Whether Juliana's future will fall into the familiar pattern or prove exceptional remains to be seen; her life is still “an open book.”

As enduring and dialogic repositories of lore and memory, autograph books illuminate such issues through their owner's “attending discourse,” which mediates between text and researcher.Footnote ² This approach resists a literal interpretation of the surface text by consulting the owners for their subjective experiences. Like games and pastimes, these mementos endure through time to tell a story of a changing city's youth culture, whose representation is too often overshadowed by adult-centered narratives of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Attention to the material expressions and patterned interactions of youth sheds light on their social networks and indicates how local subjects are socialized into—and participate in perpetuating or testing—the norms of their national and religious communities in Jerusalem.