Alberto Stabile – The Garden and the Ash

This book took my heart, chewed it up, spit it back out, set it on fire, and then laid a flower on it. Although I was in Jerusalem almost twenty years after Alberto Stabile, in events closely related to another hotel, my life was intertwined with what had become the Colony and it is so difficult, in that very high expression of welcome and integration that hotel is by its mission, to describe the precise feeling that another world, of peace and coexistence, was possible. A feeling so intense that you want to shout it out and yet so delicate, so fragile, that you cannot even touch it or whisper it, because it would dissolve under the great weight of politics, of history, of the higher social implications.Yet this book tries, to describe that feeling, simultaneously on tiptoe and in apnea, through delicate portraits that give the impression of having been written in one night. That one great night that began with Rabin’s assassination and that the dawn of a new day never dissipated again.