Vacant Lot

In this hopeful and refreshingly original dual memoir, a Canadian Jew and a Palestinian American tell the story of six trips they took together to Israel-Palestine and the difficult conversations they had along the way. Political scientist Mira Sucharov and legal scholar Omar Dajani are Middle East experts who have deep personal, familial, and political attachments to the land between the river and the sea. They set out to discover what traveling there side by side would teach them about the country they both love. What they didn’t anticipate was either the catastrophic violence and seismic political changes that would unfold over the course of their journeys together or the strains that events would place on their ties to their respective communities and their relationship with each other. In an account at once honest and compassionate, challenging and playful, Mira and Omar bring the reader along as they introduce each other to places and people they might not have encountered on their own—from the vacant lot by the sea in Jaffa where Omar’s family home once stood to the kibbutz near Gaza where Mira lived as a student; from a salsa bar in Bethlehem to a mixed disco in Haifa; from the poignant solemnity of Yad Vashem to the buried trauma of Deir Yassin. Throughout, the reader joins Mira and Omar as they try to make sense of what sharing this most contested of spaces will require. Their conversations, their observations, and their experiences—as well as the lingering gaps and silences between them—offer a window into how people navigate and negotiate their needs, dreams, and desires and the emotional hold that identity and place have on us all.