The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village

The house as ruin metaphor negates the reality of a Palestinian village that existed not long ago and is used to justify occupation of a land "long neglected." Here beneath the olive tree still standing faithfully, Abu al-Hayja' rested his head on a stone During the midday heat [pp.171-172] While Slyomovics states that the book centers on concepts of memory and how they inflect a reading of a specific place for Arab and Jew, hence the subtitle, the book is actually about the politics of Palestinian memory. Edward Linenthal describes the moral authority granted to Holocaust survivors in the series of decisions surrounding the creation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum [New York: Viking, 1995]).