OEuvre à caractère autobiographique, Les échos de la mémoire. Une enfance palestinienne à Jérusalem évoque, avec l'occupation britannique en toile de fond, de multiples souvenirs, campe d'intimes portraits de famille et nous ramène sur des lieux d'enchantement et de rébellion. Cet ouvrage, véritable lettre d'amour à Jérusalem, pose un regard singulier sur la ville. C'était avant le déracinement des Palestiniens de 1948, où se côtoyaient harmonieusement toutes les confessions. C'était avant la tempête politique.

Abdallah's encounter with the military governor on the eve of his departure for America opens this collection of stories, and Khalil al-Ibrahami's moving search for his lost fiancée in Jerusalem closes the collection. In between, Issa J. Boullata's stories show what it's like to be an Arab from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Egypt making a new life as an immigrant in Canada or the United States. This is what it is, to be displaced. This is what it is to leave your home and start over in a new country.

The distinguished Arabic scholar, author, and translator Issa J. Boullata grew up in a Palestinian family in the Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His memoir, The Bells of Memory, is delightful in its reflections on an idyllic youth and detailed in its recollections of family members, classmates and teachers, remembered scents and foods, the pleasures of reading, and his early experience of the working world. This is a love letter to a Jerusalem that was changed immeasurably by Al-Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 that dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland and dislocated many as refugees when Israel was established.