In search of a second movie theatre recommended by Munther Fami, owner of The Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel, I headed toward the German Colony with its English street names: Lloyd George and Josiah Wedgwood, trendy coffee shops, and Anglo residents. The Coffee Mill is not a coffee shop you would find in the Old City or on Ben Yehuda: New Yorker covers papered the walls; people filled the small, tightly packed tables, but the day before, I had learned a new custom at the Austrian Hospice Café. There, sitting by myself, reading The Yellow Wind by David Grossman, and yes, escaping the damp cold of my apartment, I was approached by a German couple who asked if they could sit at my four-seater table. Christian pilgrims, they were visiting churches by day and sleeping in the Old City by night.
 

 

In The Coffee Mill, I ordered a filtered coffee (“More filling than a long espresso,” suggested the American behind the counter) and looked at potential places to perch. Spotting a man whose laptop covered only half of a table’s surface, I crossed the crowded room and said: “Would you mind if I sat here?” “It’s yours,” he graciously replied. Make yourself comfortable.” Taking out my book, James Gelvin’s The Israel-Palestine Conflict, I began to read. (It is important to wait a decent interval before chatting.) “Are you sitting here to escape a cold apartment (my opening gambit on several occasions)?” I asked.
 

 

Sitting opposite me was Jon, the executive director of an NGO, the Tiziano Project http://tizianoproject.org/ which “provides community members in conflict, post conflict and underreported regions with the equipment training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives.” He had just moved to Abu Tor from Ramallah. I told him about my project, and we exchanged cards. Using terms like portal, central platform, partnering, and driving the traffic to one site; Jon explained that he is creating a website which might be useful for me. As he said, most people like me do projects, put up a blog, and then they die (the projects not the creators). He wants to have projects which tell the stories of underserved populations on one site that can be shared.

 

Unlike today, yesterday I had a mission and was not simply wandering in a neighborhood. I wanted to peruse the tiny but intellectually and entertainingly dense shelves of the Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. I also wanted to meet the owner, Munther Fami, a celebrity of sorts because of his Palestinian residency plight and the journalists he encounters at his well-known store. See “A Fixture of Jerusalem Literary Life, Threatened with Deportation” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/03/fahmi-american-colony-hotel-jerusalem-deportation.html I had been to the book store four years ago and witnessed the shelves full of award winning fiction, Palestinian memoirs, and photographs of Jerusalem street scenes.
 

 

 

The walk from my Abu Tor neighborhood to the American Colony Hotel passes Mt. Zion with its views of the Old City, goes up the paved road past the Jaffa gate, around the outside of the Old City walls to the Damascus Gate where it crosses the street to the Nablus Road. On this road, I passed men selling ka'ak, Arab bread with sesame seeds and sometimes served with zatar; the East Jerusalem bus station from which I will travel to Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin in the West Bank; and the Palestinian Pottery store. Then I arrived at the also- famous American Colony Hotel http://www.americancolony.com/ billed as “a fairytale get-away in the heart of Jerusalem, providing its luxurious hospitality services for more than 120 years. Personified by classic Arabian arches, this elegant boutique hotel prides itself in offering guests an enchanting ‘East-meets-West’ experience.” Inside the bookshop I was alone; it was Saturday, still Shabbat, and still raining. I introduced myself to Munther, described my project, and watched as he pulled ten books from the shelves about Palestinian identity. I was particularly interested in two them: The Invention and Decline of Israeliness by Baruch Kimmerling and Mountain against the Sea (Modern Palestinian culture) by Salim Tamari .Likewise, Munther was intrigued by the Middle Eastern graphic novels I mentioned; I promised to send him Harvard’s site http://gnme.wordpress.com/ listing and annotating these books. As I left, I asked him if he had read my favorite novel set in Palestine, Martyr’s Crossing by Amy Wilentz. Although he owned the book and remembered the author, the New Yorker correspondent for the Middle East and frequenter of his shop, he hadn’t read the novel yet.

 

To pay my monthly rent, I have to visit a cash machine at least three times on three different days because of daily limits imposed by Charles Schwab. Finding myself in central Jerusalem on Ben Yehuda Street at a cash machine for time # three, I secured my rent and decided to treat myself to coffee and pastry. Next to me, this time at a separate table, sat a young American woman plugged into her computer while on the phone explaining to someone that she had just finished a very rough draft. Jess, who works for the communication headquarters at UNRWA and has been living in Jerusalem for four years, gave me a number of useful sites and resources for my project: Camp Breakerz and Peacestartshere.org. Again, we exchanged cards and agreed to meet for coffee at a future date.

 

Maybe I will see these three again. Maybe I will just take advantage of the leads they gave me. Maybe…

 

Post Script: If you read the The New Yorker article about Munther, you might be interested to know that his status has been resolved, and he is allowed to stay in Jerusalem with his wonderful book store.