9th December, 2015

Losing Israel named in The Telegraph’s Best Travel Books of 2015

Michael Kerr has featured Jasmine Donahaye’s Losing Israel as one of his most highly rated travel books in the Telegraph article, Christmas books 2015: the best for the armchair traveller.
In Michael’s words:“Donahaye is an Israeli raised in Britain who discovered by chance that her family had colluded in the eviction of Palestinians in 1948. Losing Israel moves between the damp of rural Wales (where she lives now) and the desert; it weaves together travel, memoir, politics and birdwatching. It’s a brave book, unflinchingly honest, and a beautiful one.”
Losing Israel is a moving and honest account which spans travel writing, nature writing and memoir. Through the author’s personal situation it explores the powerful and competing attachments that people feel about their country and its history, by attempting to understand and reconcile her conflicted attachments, rooted in her family story – and in a love of Israel’s birds. A life-long bird watcher, Donahaye uses birds in Israel and her home in Wales to provide an unexpected and intriguing linking trope across the various themes of the book. Losing Israel stands apart from other titles about the Israel/Palestine situation with its focus on the British Mandate period, Palestine’s history in the 1930s, and the kibbutz movement. Her writing is frank and often immediate: the locations in Israel and Wales are sensually alive, and the author’s physical exertions felt by the reader. Her childhood memories of her mother’s kibbutz, and her own experiences in Israel and Wales as an adult also bring originality to her writing. Losing Israel works on many levels – family relationships, the nature of patriotism and nationalism, cultural dislocation, the story of the Jewish diaspora and Israel, how history changes from one generation to the next, the histories of the dispossessed and the oppressed. In combining history, birdwatching, and her personal story Donahaye has written an accessible and human book about an habitual controversial conflict.
You can buy Losing Israel here.