Find Me at the Jaffa Gate
by Micaela Sahhar
ISBN 9781761170287
Reviewed by FINLEY JAPP
A photograph, Palestine, c.1920s: a young man has stopped on the side of a country road. He poses with flair beside his car, seeming to drink straight from an ibrik (pitcher). The man exudes confidence and joie de vivre. He appears as a proud Palestinian and a natural tour guide. There is of course no indication, in the image, that he and his family will, decades later, end up in Melbourne, driven out of their community and homeland in the Nakba.
That young man is Micaela Sahhar’s paternal grandfather, Abdullah, and it is with this ebullient photograph that she begins her intimate family history Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An encyclopedia of a Palestinian family (2025). It is a work that inevitably speaks to and enriches the popular (though seemingly not popular enough) understanding of Palestinian experiences, but Sahhar’s book is also a deeply personal and idiosyncratic work that has little time for soundbite history. If this makes for an occasionally sinuous work, which sifts through memories and reckons with the archive, it is always with a purpose: to show the difficult process of gathering history when the community in question has been deliberately torn apart. What emerges, across forty-eight short and interweaving chapters, is both a rich personal story and an impressive work of scholarship that resists what Sahhar has elsewhere called the “tabula rasa of the settler imagination” (1).
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is sprinkled throughout with both actual photographs and descriptions of them, and the opening image of Abdullah with his car is characteristic of their tone: it is at once striking and enigmatic, evocative and nostalgic. The images hint at a world that did exist but which is now largely lost. The included images often do not correspond to the preceding text or even to the ‘captions’ underneath; rather, they add a texture of what life in Jerusalem was like for Sahhar’s family before the Nakba forced them out of their homes and eventually led some of them to Australia.
This non-linear collage strategy of photographs and text reflects how colonial projects, in killing and displacing people, also displace narrative. Families are rent apart, stories get lost, and memories of the homeland threaten to be forgotten (this is intentional, so that testimony of the injustice might also disappear). Sahhar’s book vigorously resists this erasure of narrative by collecting and preserving the stories of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations. But Find Me at the Jaffa Gate also dramatizes the struggle of completing such a project. Its fragmentary chapters re-enact the fracturing of the Palestinian community by jumping between present day and history, from one character to another, and between versions of events. As readers, we are privy to Sahhar reckoning with the deliberate elimination of her family’s history, and the challenge to “find [her] way back to the unfragmentation of the world as we knew it” (p9).
This can create an aesthetic discomfort, which is both difficult and valuable. The opening chapters move quickly between an array of family relatives and the reader might struggle to find their footing before being whisked off to another time and place (note there is a partial family tree in the appendix). But the point of writing is not pre-packaged digestibility: having the curtain pulled back allows the reader to actively take part in Sahhar’s project of piecing together her family history. The disorientation itself is valuable; in the essay Recognising the Stranger (2024), Isabella Hammad describes the ethical power of defamiliarization to disrupt the separation between self and other (2). The point at which narrative breaks down, Hammad suggests, is the point at which we are “decentred, when the light of an other appears on the horizon in the project of human freedom, which remains undone” (p56). Thus, the fragmentary form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate not only literalises the difficulty of piecing together a narrative after forced diaspora, it also creates an ethical space in which writer and reader can empathise and learn in good faith.
Sahhar’s writing is consistently charming. The chapters encompass childhood memories, second-hand stories of her relatives in Jerusalem, contemporary visits to Occupied Palestine and across the world, and archival research. Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem is an occasional motif, being nearby to both a restaurant and a tour company that different relatives of Sahhar ran in the early 20th century. But the real sinews of the book are the people themselves: the generous and broken Ellen, the entrepreneurial George, the gregarious and hard-working Abdullah.
Throughout, there is an impressive commitment to preserving Palestinian history, even extending to geographical knowledge of landscapes that have since been altered beyond recognition. Sahhar declaims with pride that “you can ask any Palestinian who has never returned in their lifetime, and yet they will describe to you the entrance of their house” (p155). While physical landmarks have been demolished or dispossessed, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate reinforces a sense of belonging through story. Sahhar’s poignant articulation, “look here, I have built our beautiful home out of words” (p.262, italics in the original) becomes a telos for the work as a whole. The book is imagined as a space for belonging and for resisting settler-colonial displacement.
While the focus of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is historical, some of Sahhar’s most beautiful prose relates to her own experiences and travels in the present day. There is a moving tribute to the historian Patrick Wolfe, whose spirit, in Sahhar’s rendering, is sensitive and playful. Sahhar writes that Wolfe avows “he never would visit [Palestine] until the time when the Palestinians invited him” (p.111), and they travel there together for a conference not long before Wolfe’s death. Her description of mourning him evokes the grief of the ongoing occupation of Palestine, but it is also touchingly personal:
… all the exchanges that are miscellaneous between two people until one of them dies and then you reify these things and collect them together as something partial and precious. And you regret all the fragments which are intangible and which, like people, are things you can’t keep anywhere but in the unreliable eye of your mind.
(p.108)
Sahhar’s descriptions of loss, displacement, and ethnic cleansing in Palestine cannot help but resonate with the Australian colonial project and dispossession of Aboriginal people. She writes with sensitivity and great empathy about the tension of being a settler at the same time as belonging to a people whose own land has been colonised. Nevertheless, Sahhar argues that comparisons are valuable but “not symmetrical” (p.219): she contends that Israel denies the very identity of Palestinian, whereas in Australia, Aboriginal people are seen to have once existed, but no longer. I’m not convinced by this distinction; both Israel’s chilling persecution of Palestinians and Australia’s own refusal to recognise Aboriginal sovereignty suggest that there is plenty of flexibility, in the colonial imagination, for mounting whatever argument is needed in order to maintain the illusion of a right to the land. In other words, the rhetoric is less important than the function it serves, and in this regard there is much to be gained from reflecting on the experience that Sahhar writes about in the context of the genocide of First Nations people in Australia.
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a generously intimate work of family history and scholarship. Sahhar’s joy and love for Palestine is palpable, and shines through in her lush, poetic prose. The book is, moreover, a politically engaged text, attending to the power of narrative and the ongoing resistance of Palestinian people, including through its consideration of form. It is a gift to the reader that Sahhar realises her project: that people living and dead, and places across the world, “might dwell here together on my page” (p.8).
Citations
- Sahhar, M. “Notes Towards the Limits of Imagining.” Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Spring 2025, pp. 98-108. doi: 10.1353/nai.2025.a957111.
- Hammad, I. Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Penguin, 2024.
FINLEY JAPP (they/he) is a bookseller and student of literature and Spanish living on Wurundjeri country. They write a weekly literary blog for Collins Booksellers Mildura.