Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays 1982-1999

For me the best part of this book is not its engagement with some of the world's current sources of real and political pain, but its recommendation and honest appraisal of other books. Mr. Alcalay writes informatively and with tasteful purpose. Even the essays of a more personal nature I found moving, but the books he has read and recommends are the diamonds that too often remain beneath the rubble. I cannot say there is anywhere else I would have found some of these authors recommended or reviewed. Mr. Alcalay writes with enthusiasm about authors whose literatures will never make the weekend book page. These authors are diverse in approach (poets, novelists, essayists, historians) and smart. They provide more immediate accounts of other places and states, some of the light and the heavy. This book fills a need by providing the names necessary for readers to get better acquainted with writers in the Middle East and some chosen Eastern European regions. I recommend this book highly.

Memories Of Our Future is an outstanding anthology of essays surveying the complexities of Mediterranean cultures; the diverse, changing space of the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa -- areas of diasporas, dislocations, and genocidal exterminations provoked nationalism and religious fanaticism. As a Sephardic-Croatian Jew, Ammiel Alcalay confronts the deep resistance to change of any kind in this region, and describes his personal intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and political endeavor to help break down barriers between peoples, nations, and languages. Of special interest is his observations and analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian confrontation, Arab/Jewish poetics, and Jewish identity in America. Memories Of Our Future is seriously recommended reading for students of Balkan, Middle Eastern, and North African studies.