Close, close beneath the land I had once rooted myself in and loved, lay a land filled with violence, injustice and hatred

On 22 April 1962 what remains of Göran Rosenberg’s family embark from his native Sweden to make Israel their new home. Transplanted into a nation born only a few months before him, he is first enchanted by its vitality, imprinted by its ideals. It marks the beginning of a lifetime’s journey across the promised land and into its past, a reckoning with the utopian visions and desperate fears that went into Zionism as well as the violence and dispossession of its realization. This landmark book tells the story of that journey – through buried stories and erased villages, dreams and disillusionments, and the histories still unfurling today.

Göran Rosenberg was born outside Stockholm in 1948, the son of two Holocaust survivors. After his father’s suicide, his mother brought the remainder of his family to Israel. The story of his experiences and entanglements there are told here. Rosenberg is the author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, which was awarded the August Prize in Sweden and Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France, as well as Another Zionism, Another Judaism, which was awarded the Letterstedt Prize for outstanding biography by the Swedish Academy.