At a time when Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and countless attacks across occupied Palestine are growing in intensity and scale, remembering history differently and insisting on the possibility of what today seems impossible is no easy task. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi has written an urgent, meticulously researched, and beautifully narrated account of a historical friendship, the city of Jerusalem, and a moment in the history of Mandate Palestine. An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem before and After 1948 is dedicated to an unlikely and disobedient friendship that came into existence in the early 1940s in Mandate Jerusalem and which crossed national, gendered, religious, and ethnic boundaries and obstacles at a time when competing nationalisms, ideologies, and new forms of belonging where already making such friendly constellations fraught and challenging. Reconstructing a past that is continuously being erased and envisioning alternatives against an increasingly violent present, Impossible Friendship shows how personal and individual stories can challenge national and nationalist narratives, add nuance, and “draw more complex pictures” (p. 14).

Through letters, autobiographies, unpublished diaries, works of fiction, photographs and works of art, interviews, and a wide range of other sources located across multiple decades and geographic locations, Mejcher-Atassi mobilizes a historical friendship that was never immune to, but always disobedient in the face of, political turmoil and antagonism, in order to remind readers “of a time when the future of Palestine was still open and when so much seemed possible” (p. 225). An Impossible Friendship is an ambitious work of biography, intellectual history, and microhistory that constantly engages with literary studies and texts produced by the characters under study. The book uses a creative and transnational approach to sources and archives gathered in multiple locations. This becomes an effective strategy to circumvent the looting and destruction of Palestinian archives—a reality that can make it challenging to reconstruct the social and cultural history of Jerusalem.

The historical friendship in question is that of Walid Khalidi (1925–), Sally Kassab (1920–98), Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916–91), Rasha Salam (1922–2004), and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–94), a group of friends who came together in Mandate Jerusalem and who each contributed to the world of modern art, literature, and thought. Throughout the book, Mejcher-Atassi is on a first-name basis with her characters and writes about their lives with empathy, honesty, and admiration. The five friends—Wolfgang Hildesheimer, a German Jew, playwright, novelist, and biographer; Walid Khalidi, a Jerusalemite historian of Palestine; Rasha Salam, an Arab nationalist and feminist, married to Walid Khalidi; Jabra Ibrahim Jaba, prominent modernist writer, critic, and translator; and Sally Kassab, born to Greek Orthodox parents in Beirut, but raised in Jerusalem and England—are carefully studied as both friends and individuals. While some of the five have already had their biographies written, Mejcher-Atassi adds new information by examining their lives, not within specific national traditions, but “in terms of their connection to one another and to transnational circuits of modern art, literature, and intellectual thought” (p. 17).

The book consists of a prologue, an introduction, seven chapters, and an epilogue. The seven chapters are divided into two parts, with the first five chapters dedicated to the period before 1948. The last two chapters examine the world after 1948 when the close-knit circle and the city of Jerusalem was upended by war and conflict. Mejcher-Atassi, however, resists making war and conflict the gravitational point in her narrative. Drawing on Ussama Makdisi’s recent Age of Coexistence (University of California Press, 2019), Mejcher-Atassi frames the friendship between her five protagonists as ecumenical and cutting across Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious lines in ways that resulted in intimate friendship and solidarity. In Chapter 1, “Changing Jerusalem: A New Panorama of the Holy City,” Mejcher-Atassi lays out the limitations of writing history through a relatively small, privileged, and intellectual elite. The friendship in question, she shows, was in many ways contingent on British colonial rule and facilitated by English as their shared lingua franca, foreign education, and social, cultural, and economic capital. The friendship “intersected closely with notions of race, class, and educational opportunity that set this group of friends apart from other segments of society in Mandate Palestine as an intellectual elite, enmeshed in a cosmopolitanism of affluence” (p. 2). An Impossible Friendship never obscures the fact that many Palestinians and others who labored to make this cosmopolitanism of affluence possible have largely disappeared from the historical record. As mentioned, Chapters 2–5 are dedicated to the five friends. The only one of the friends to not have her own chapter is Sally Kassab. According to Mejcher-Atassi, episodes and details from the lives of the two female protagonists, Rasha and Sally, have “sadly and silently slipped through the cracks of history” (p. 18). While Chapter 3 is devoted to Rasha, “the absence of a chapter devoted to Sally “underlines the silence we often encounter in archives as well as the gendered nature of this silence” (p. 18). It is a definite strength of the book that it never turns a blind eye to these silences.

While much of the book centers on Jerusalem, An Impossible Friendship invites its readers to visit several other cities and countries through the travels, moves, and exiles of the five mobile friends. In addition, the group’s interactions with other intellectuals, including Albert Hourani, are described in detail, thereby showing that the circle of friends was not exclusive. The last physical meeting of the five friends occurred on July 21, 1946 at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, a place where the friends frequently gathered. The following day, terrorists belonging to Irgun, the right-wing Zionist underground paramilitary group, blew up the hotel, killing ninety-one people and obliterating the preferred rendezvous of the five friends.

While the book deserves praise on the whole, the two last chapters, “Border Crossing” and “Public Engagement in Worlds Apart,” which narrate the period after the bombing when all the friends, apart from Wolfgang, were forced to leave Palestine, are the strongest. Through letters sent and exchanged after the friends were dispersed, Mejcher-Atassi produces compelling readings of the intimacy, longing, and care of the friendships she studies. Ironically, although the frequency and volume of their letter correspondence is not addressed, the intimacy of the friendship is much more legible and tangible in the letters, after the friends were forced to scatter and continue their friendship in writing. It is also in the two final chapters that distance, disappointment, lost possibilities, and politics rise to the surface of the friendship circle. Between 1948, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the First Intifada, Wolfgang increasingly aligned himself with official Israeli politics and publicly defended Israeli expansion and violence. While he began to voice criticism in his private letters to Rasha in the 1980s, these opinions were never made public. The friendship, it seems, unable to survive war, violence, and nationalism unscathed, never really regained its strength and intimacy. For many readers, the weakening or loss of friendships will likely feel acutely and painfully recognizable in this moment of global inaction, moral failure, and active support for Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Mandate Palestine, the history of Jerusalem, modernist art and literature, intellectual history, and the intersection of history and biography. The book never falls into the trappings of nostalgia and, moreover, Mejcher-Atassi convincingly demonstrates exactly how much we stand to lose if we uncritically accept the status of the present as the inevitable outcome of history. As such, the book is also guaranteed to facilitate meaningful teaching moments, demonstrating to students the value of not reducing complex histories to easy stereotypes and hasty generalizations. In a minor criticism, for a book that places friendship at the center of its analysis, a slightly more elaborate theoretical and historical engagement with the category and practice of friendship in the modern Middle East would have benefitted the narrative. The scarcity of studies of friendship in the modern Middle East makes An Impossible Friendship an extremely valuable contribution. Thanks to Mejcher-Atassi, we now have an excellent example of exactly how productive and enlightening the study of friendships is. One can hope that her account will inspire scholars to continue this line of inquiry in the future.