Through the eyes of these families from Jaffa we understand how the founding of the state of Israel could be simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews, and a disaster - the Naqba - for the 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948, most of them never to return. Jaffa was for centuries the main port of the eastern Mediterranean, home to Muslims, Christians and Jews, while the produce of its orange groves was famed throughout the world. From 1920 the British administered the city under the Mandate and it is in 1920 that Adam LeBor's ambitious and engaging new book begins to tell the history of Israel through the prism of Jaffa. Its inhabitants include the Jewish coffee and spice merchant, the Arab baker who made bread for the whole community, the Palestinian exile who tried to bring modern business methods to the Arafat era and the Jewish schoolgirl who befriended an Arab drug dealer. In this ground-breaking book Adam LeBor goes beyond the media stereotypes to recount a moving human story of a country born of conflict.
Adam LeBor is a British author and journalist. He has written seven critically-acclaimed non-fiction works including the best-selling 'Hitler's Secret Bankers', an investigation into Swiss complicity with the Third Reich, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and 'City of Oranges', the story of six Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize.
His most recent non-fiction work, 'The Believers', an investigation into the Madoff fraud, focusing on the psychology and sociology of the $65 billion scam, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. His first novel, 'The Budapest Protocol', a conspiracy thriller inspired by wartime US intelligence documents about the Nazis' secret post-war plans, was published this year to great reviews. Foreign rights to his books have been sold in fourteen countries including America, Japan, France, Spain, Israel, Poland, Hungary and Indonesia.
He writes for The Times of London, the Sunday Times and Monocle magazine and reviews books for The Sunday Times, the Economist, the New York Times and the Jewish Chronicle. He has appeared at the Edinburgh and Bath literary festivals, Jewish Book Week and the Montreal literary festival.
