Learning To Make An Oud In Nazareth

de Ruth Padel

Through images of craft and conflict, and the ways in which human beings turn to making things as a way through crisis, these poems trace a quest for harmony in the midst of destruction. An ancient synagogue survives two arson attacks. An 'oud, the core instrument of Middle Eastern music, is made and broken. A Palestinian boy in a West Bank refugee camp learns to dance and a Polish Jew in a Nazi camp carves a chain from a broom-handle. A guide shows us round Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during a siege. What unites this book is the common ground shared by the world's core religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and a sense of human experience as pilgrimage and vulnerability, persecution and incarceration, but also as music, pattern and form. Its moving final vision is one of restoration and regeneration, and Ruth Padel shows us, with care and empathy, how the complexities of conflict in the Holy Land speak to the heart of human experience: "Wherever we're looking from / we are this Middle East. Some chasm / through the centre must be in and of us all".