She was born in New York City in 1938, raised in a Jewish Zionist family in pre-Israel Palestine, and will speak at the Gloucester Stage Co. this Thursday at 7 p.m., in what the Gloucester Writers Center’s organizer calls “an urgent and timely reading and conversation.”
She is Linda Dittmar, an Israeli-American, Boston-based scholar and author who was not just a front-row witness to history but lived it, at ground level, and wrote about it in her memoir “Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging.”
Described on Amazon as “a raw and courageous memoir, a searing personal journey to uncover the suppressed traumas, facts, and myths that undergird the … Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Dittmar’s book was 10 years in the making and published well in advance of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 on Israel. There was no such thing as Hamas in the Palestine and Israel of Dittmar’s youth. Her book, launched last summer, was written from a perspective that is sympathetic to Palestinian Arabs.
What can’t be be argued with is her own history, as a woman of 85 remembering the young woman she was, and poignantly revisiting the places of her childhood, which were home to Palestinians who are no longer there.
She also remembers Israel in its earliest days, a thousand-years-old dream come true out of the ashes of the Holocaust. It was a heady time, a time a young Paul Newman — himself half-Jewish — embodied the spirit of the new Israel in the blockbuster movie “The Exodus.”
Dittmar was a young Zionist Palestinian Jew coming of age as a proud new Israeli She was also growing up in a time the Palestinians call the “Nakba” — “catastrophe” in Arabic — the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed the 1947 UN General Assembly adoption of Resolution 181 that partitioned the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab.
When, in 1961, Dittmar returned to America to pursue what would become an impressive academic career, she found herself as a young idealist swept up in the civil rights movement and began to see parallels between the divisions separating Black and white and separating Arabs and Jews. Recalling Arab neighbors and villages of her childhood, she says that in time she came to see her youth “through different eyes.”
Years later, returning to Israel for an extended visit that would result in her book, Dittmar was accompanied by a photographer who, compelled by the ruins of Palestinian villages, urged her to allow them to be photographed.
Dittmar at first refused, feeling to do so would be to betray her beloved Israel. But in time she relented, agreeing that this “travelogue” written in ruins should be seen by the world.
In a city which, for more than 150 years has been home to a vital and engaged Jewish community, a city which, along with an annual Lobster Trap Christmas Tree, will in a few days host its annual lighting of a Lobster Trap Menorah on the lawn of Middle Street’s Temple Ahavit Akim, Dittmar may find herself facing a tough audience.
That’s okay, says says Eric Parkinson, director of programming for the Gloucester Writer’s Center, as long as the evening “contextualizes the catastrophic events of Oct. 7 and their aftermath in a way that invites us all to deep and sustained reflection.”