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150 JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN'S STUDIES pressure the government and parliament for its implementation once Turkey became a party to the Convention in December 1985. The result is not a small achievement for a fairly new and small movement, and the comprehensive reporting of the changes and improvements that took place until 2002 is not a small accomplishment for a small book. The Object ofMemory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village Susan Slyomovics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. xxv + 294 pp. including appendices, notes, bibliography and index. $19.95 paperback. Reviewed by Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan In a melding of several different types of analysis—historical, anthropological , and even literary—Susan Slyomovics describes how a group of internally displaced Palestinians, conflating the physical and the metaphysical, bring an extinct past back to life through active memory and present-day practices. The Object ofMemory focuses primarily on the Arab population formerly of the Palestinian village Ein Houd, now living in an illegal village-in-exile they call Ein Houd al-Jadidah. (The former Ein Houd is currently a Jewish Dadaist artists ' community called Ein Hod.) Slyomovics treats these three entities—the now-extinct Ein Houd, Ein Hod, and Ein Houd al-Jadidah—as existing simultaneously and interacting in often jarring ways. Memory becomes a more complex matter than a reader may first believe, as it is not only a part of the mind but visible as a layer beneath the present. Throughout the book, Slyomovics is occupied with the simultaneous existences of different times in current spaces. The most vivid examples of living memory in space are the houses of the Israeli artists in Ein Hod, which were formerly the family homes of the inhabitants of Ein Houd, often dating back hundreds ofyears and many generations. The Israelis perceive the village and the houses they have occupied not as vessels of memory but as works of art with an anonymous, primitive past. Upon entering the village in 1948, they made an active effort to erase all traces ofthe Arab past while maintaining its physical structures, reducing the village to a purely aesthetic essence. Some- BOOK REVIEWS 151 times an Israeli settler momentarily slips into acknowledging the presence of the past; one artist, Rafael Uzan, was initially shocked by the sight of a child's abandoned sandals in his new home, but decidedly swept them out (63). However, according to Slyomovics, the extinct Ein Houd exists continuously through the efforts of its former inhabitants. Often these efforts are through "memorial books"—books produced for the purpose of documenting the past and attempting to make destroyed homes real again through stories, maps, and images. The Arabs of Ein Houd are unique in that their village, though transformed, has not actually been destroyed, but their memorial books are no less fraught with emotion. Indeed, the continuing existence of the physical Ein Houd, layered over with the present Ein Hod, intensifies the emotional dynamic between the two entities; photographs such as that of Muhammad Mubarak standing in front of his former family home, now the home of artist Sofia Hillel, are especially powerful (145). A similarly difficult dynamic with regard to the Arabs themselves is the notion that they are in "internal exile"—that is, "present absentees," or strangers in their own homeland. The attempts of the former Ein Houd to stay grounded in their homeland by forming the new village of Ein Houd al-Jadidah have gone unrecognized by the Israeli government, and their village continues to be considered an illegal settlement; there have even been attempts at demolition. The tensions caused by the paradoxical relationships between extinct and existing, and present and absent, are a primary component of Slyomovics's ethnographic analysis of Ein Houd/Ein Hod. Slyomovics also takes some space to focus specifically on the traditions that the displaced Palestinians of Ein Houd have taken with them into exile. In one chapter, she examines the madafah, or Palestinian guest house, as it has been carried over into new Palestinian settlements. The madafah, she argues, functions as an object of memory—something the Palestinians of Ein Houd attempt...

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