Palestinian poet Lina Jawdat has published her first poetry collection, titled 70,000, revisiting the memory of thousands of Palestinian books confiscated from homes and private libraries during the 1948 Nakba.
اضافة اعلان
Published by Central Avenue Publishing in Canada in 2026, the book combines poetry, historical documents, photographs, maps and collage art in an attempt to transform the loss of books into a literary and visual testimony to cultural dispossession.
The project is built around the handwritten numbering of books from one to 70,000, with each number representing a lost book. The work brings together collective history and personal and family memory.
Jawdat drew inspiration for the project from a reference to confiscated Palestinian books in historian Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
According to the publisher, around 6,000 of these books remain in Israeli national collections, while the vast majority have not been returned.
Drawing on her experience in trauma-focused psychotherapy, Judeh explores the relationship between memory, loss and resilience, presenting a work that goes beyond a conventional poetry collection to become an artistic and historical archive.
Source: Al-Ghad
