Storytelling Matters: On Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s <i>An Impossible Friendship</i>

ABSTRACT Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s An Impossible Friendship offers a compelling group biography of five intellectuals and artists in Mandatory Jerusalem whose lives intersected before and after 1948. The review highlights Mejcher-Atassi’s narrative approach, which blends literary and social history to reconstruct a vibrant, ecumenical circle committed to art, dialogue, and cosmopolitan ideals amid rising national tensions. Drawing on personal archives and memoirs, the book challenges dominant historiographical narratives by portraying Jerusalem as a site of “fragile tranquility” and intercommunal coexistence. Dubnov reflects on Mejcher-Atassi’s use of storytelling as a political and aesthetic act, emphasizing its role in fostering empathy and historical imagination. The review situates the book within broader debates on intellectual history, biography, and postcolonial critique, ultimately celebrating its elegiac tone and its call for a renewed liberal sensibility in times of division.