Ancient alley, archway, and stairway in the Old City of Jerusalem, April 28, 2023

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Jerusalem Stands Alone

May 28, 2025

-minute read

Jerusalem Stands Alone is a collection of portraits of a handful of people who live in Jerusalem’s various neighborhoods. They are ordinary people living lives in which not much happens; in fact, there is no real storyline with a beginning, middle, and end to latch on to. The characters are presented to the reader in a sequence of 155 short, interconnected vignettes, each of which gives an impression, a snapshot of time.

The first vignette, “A City,” evokes the history of the place through the ghosts of past inhabitants; the present is evoked through the presence of armed soldiers. The second vignette, “Another Evening,” describes a city that shuts down at sunset and holds its breath, hoping to make it through the night without violence. And thus, internationally renowned author Mahmoud Shukair establishes the mood and setting: a city on edge, a place where people live their lives in moments infused with sadness, fear, and uncertainty.

Bio Mahmoud Shukair

A prolific novelist who was exiled from Jerusalem for almost two decades, yet says “Jerusalem is a part of me and I am part of Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem Stands Alone book cover by Mahmoud Shukair

Book cover of Jerusalem Stands Alone by Mahmoud Shukair

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Amazon

Most of the characters portrayed in this novel are Palestinian, but some Israelis lurk, too. The characters feel the weight of the city’s history as well as its present sadness. Their moments of happiness are fleeting, found for the most part in home life, in wedding celebrations where women dance and young men think of the girls they fancy, in walking to school with classmates, and in the communion of the marital bond.

There is uncertainty, too. Loved ones are missing. The main characters in the novel are a fishmonger, Abd el-Razzak, and his wife, Khadija; their daughter, Rabab, and her unnamed husband, who is the narrator of many vignettes. One of Abd el-Razzak and Khadija’s sons moved to Europe years ago to search for his foreign girlfriend, and they have no address for him, and thus no way of contacting him or even knowing whether he is still alive. Their other son has just been released from an Israeli prison, and he is a changed man—he avoids interacting with others, has no interest in his mother’s plans to find him a bride, and spends time in prayer. He is convinced that evil is everywhere. The prison experience, so common to Palestinian men, is one that is hard to move past, because released prisoners are frequently rearrested, as this young man is.

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A street in the Old City leading away from al-Haram al-Sharif toward Jaffa Gate, March 2, 2007

A road in the Old City leading away from al-Haram al-Sharif toward Jaffa Gate, March 2, 2007

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Beggs, Creative Commons

The threat of Israeli violence is always present. Various characters experience random gunshots aimed at their windows for no reason or into a hospital operating theater. A settler shoots at a Palestinian teenager, killing him. The murder is reported factually, like a news item; it is after all not so uncommon. Rabab’s husband walks home at night from a café a short distance away and is frisked twice by armed Israeli soldiers who bark orders at him in the language of the occupier. In another vignette, the same narrator observes in 2009: “I don’t recall the defeat of 1967, but I’m living it now.”1 From his bedroom window, he and his wife look out to see Israeli settlements fanning out in all directions. An armed Israeli presence pervades the Old City like a foul odor.

The threat of Israeli violence is always present.

Street market in the Old City of Jerusalem, July 29, 2006

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Ester Inbar, Wikimedia Commons

Across from Abd el-Razzak and Khadija’s home lives a community of Israeli settlers. They don’t speak to the couple or show signs that they even see them. They sit on the porch of their apartment, their machine guns nearby, staring covetously at their neighbor’s home, and this unnerves the couple, preventing them from enjoying evenings on their porch. The porch becomes off limits to them. Khadija herself hardly ever leaves her home, apparently afraid that she will return to find it occupied. Soon the settlers are marking the walls of her home as one they plan to take over. And then the couple receives an expulsion notice, like so many Jerusalem residents whose presence interferes with Israel’s plans to engineer a solid majority of Jewish residents in Jerusalem. By the end of the book, it isn’t clear how they intend to respond; it’s not as though they can show their house deed to an impartial (Israeli) court (is there such a thing?) and end the matter. Their son who is roaming in Europe might have helped his parents navigate the Kafkaesque maze that is the Israeli legal system, but he is lost to them.

As presented in the novel, Jerusalem is a layered city of ghosts and times past. Those who once lived in the city hover in alleys. In one vignette, a character is making his way home from Damascus Gate and feels surrounded by others: “A group of knights on horseback follows him [someone heading toward West Jerusalem] wearing helmets from the Ayyubid period, and Yamani swords hang on their waists. They don’t stop me as I move past them.”2 Perhaps because they recognize him as a native son. In a later excerpt, he and his wife take a stroll through the city. They recall previous landmarks that disappeared or were altered over time. The memories don’t trigger sadness; rather, they convey a sense of groundedness in a city that “embraces us like children to her bosom.”3

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Greek Catholic Patriarchate Street and restaurant at night, Old City, November 19, 2007

Greek Catholic Patriarchate Street in the Old City, November 19, 2007

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Chris Yunker, Creative Commons

Jerusalemites who were expelled in 1948 seem as present as anyone walking in the alleys of the Old City. Khalil Sakakini lives on in Jerusalem in the memory of those who knew of his great love for his wife, Sultana, and his son, both of whom died young and in his lifetime; he died a few months after burying his son.

Wasif Jawhariyya and Shahnaz, the woman who sang to the melody of his lute, make a cameo appearance; she wasted away for unspecified reasons. They are not forgotten.

Bio Khalil Sakakini

An educator, political and social figure, and intellectual whose diary of over 3,000 pages covers 45 turbulent years in Jerusalem and Palestine in the early 20th century

As presented in the novel, Jerusalem is a layered city of ghosts and times past.

The Israeli chief of police, Yoram, sees figures from previous centuries roaming the neighborhoods and sends his troops looking for hidden Ottoman arsenals he read about, convinced that they are still in the city. He is convinced that a Lebanese journalist poses a threat and places his name on border crossing checklists, unaware that the journalist has been dead for years. As his hallucinations become more insistent and he becomes less able to tell fantasy from reality, he commits suicide. Khadija, too, is undone by the pressures of living in Jerusalem. Needing to connect with her absent son, she imagines he has a child of his own, living with her, whom she must soothe when he cries and knit sweaters for him.

Shukair’s style—at times economical and understated, and at other times lyrical—infuses each portrait with a palpable tenderness. Take, for example, a writer’s words to Rabab, his much younger wife: “I love a woman who knows when to cuddle in a man’s lap like a pigeon, and when to give him space.”4 Khadija experiences her house as a living entity; in her description of her husband, the house helps to reconcile their different temperaments: “Abd al-Rahman grew up with a bad temperament. The house put up with him because the house is patient and has a big heart.”5 When she senses the house is “unwell,” she hoses it down to restore its previous equilibrium. Rabab is a poet who rewrites a poem seven times but is dissatisfied with it: “the city’s pain is much graver than her own, more massive than her senses can grasp.”6

Bio Wasif Jawhariyyeh

A musician and diarist who created an invaluable account of life in Jerusalem from the late Ottoman to the British Mandate periods

Enigmatic title

The enigmatic title of the volume merits pondering. Jerusalem is unique among cities—there is none like it anywhere in the world, a focal point for the more than three billion believers of three monotheistic religions. Yet these believers do not intercede to protect the city from political machinations; Jerusalem stands alone because of what its people have to endure without international intervention. The list of conquerors over the centuries is a long one (and a timeline of their successive appearances is helpfully provided in an afterword). Its current controllers, however, have succeeded in doing what others have not: sealed it off and made it inaccessible to those even in neighboring areas. This holy city, which has been welcoming to foreign pilgrims for centuries, is not easily reached even by the faithful residents of neighboring villages who believe that praying within its walls is itself a blessing.

Jerusalem stands alone because of what its people have to endure without international intervention.

Jerusalemites stand alone as they carry their individual crosses. Suzanne, a French tourist who rents a room in Khadija’s house, makes the connection between the passion of the Christ bearing his cross, and the present residents of this embattled city who are struggling to live under a hostile political regime. So does a vignette narrator for whom the city’s past is ever-present:

On my way to the Lions’ Gate, I see him staggering uphill, bearing his cross toward the city that will never forget him. He stops to rest when he’s too tired, then walks forward again to his fate. The good-hearted poor surround him, wrapped in sorrow and silence as the army stands watch over the scene until the end. . . .

He faces his fate without blaming the city, while the city pays no attention to the flowing blood.

It will wake up soon, though, as if shaken by an earthquake.7

Jerusalem’s agony is its own; no one comes to the aid of a city that has been placed under siege and isolated from its hinterland by a foreign power. One gets the strong sense that its (Palestinian) residents have been abandoned to deal with well-organized, malevolent forces on their own. They have only one another to turn to, and whatever satisfaction they can find in their relationships, to help them weather the ills that come their way, to eke out some comfort and meaning despite all their hardships.

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Notes

Mahmoud Shukair, Jerusalem Stands Alone, trans. Nicole Fares (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019), 10.

Page 8.

Page 103.

Page 101.

Page 105.

Page 138.

Page 44.

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Ida Audeh

Editor, Jerusalem Story

Ida Audeh is an editor who lives in Virginia. Her review of Anan Ameri’s The Wandering Palestinian: A Memoir was published in Journal of Palestine Studies 50, no. 3 (2021).

Jerusalem Stands Alone

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The threat of Israeli violence is always present.

As presented in the novel, Jerusalem is a layered city of ghosts and times past.

Enigmatic title

Jerusalem stands alone because of what its people have to endure without international intervention.

Posted in:

Tagged under:

Notes

Editor, Jerusalem Story