Between the Shelves of Jerusalem

After a dear friend based in Sheikh Jarrah recommended it to me, I’d grown increasingly curious about a very special bookshop and decided one lazy morning to seek it out. And I was not to be disappointed.

Stepping inside The Educational Bookshop, leaving the hustle and bustle of Salah ad-Din Street behind, feels like entering a story of its own.

To the left of the entrance sits a girl with thick glasses, her head buried in a book, as I soon come to learn, a regular visitor. To the right, a man with a long grey ponytail and neatly trimmed moustache, dressed in a leather jacket and biker boots, sits upright, thoroughly absorbed in Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature.

On the high shelves framing the display tables, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, and Sahar Khalifeh sit alongside many lesser-known writers. Many titles are long out of print, and it could pose a real challenge to get hold of them anywhere else, especially back in Europe.

Read the full article here: https://elsewherethen.substack.com/p/between-the-shelves-of-jerusalem