The Lines We Draw

<p><b>'What makes this brilliant, considered book worthwhile is not its breadth but how thoughtful it is.'</b><br><b><i>Financial Times</i></b><br><br><b>'The book is stunning. He is an extraordinary writer. Such erudition. Wisdom. Humanity. And humour. ' </b><br><b>Fergal Keane, BBC News</b><br><br>Tim Franks spent years as the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. During that time, he was attacked as a self-hating Jew and as an Islamophobe – as a tool of competing, malign agendas. He always tried to respond with a journalist’s detached curiosity, drawing a clear line between his identity and his work. Up to the point that he asked himself: is that necessary? Beyond the judgments of others: what does it mean to be Jewish?<br><br>It was a question he struggled to answer. As a child in 1970s Birmingham, Tim was a practising Jew with hardly any relations or sense of lineage. And so he embarked on a search for his ancestral roots, from Constantinople to Curaçao, from Amsterdam to the death camps, from Lithuania to Downing Street.<br><br>Framing each part of his journey through what he has learned as a journalist, Tim discovers ancestors who all speak to a part of the Jewish story: there are the refugees and the risk-takers; the artists, rabbis, soldiers and revolutionaries; there is even a route to the Conservative Party’s unlikeliest leader, Benjamin Disraeli.<br><br>This book is a deeply empathetic memoir which encourages us all to confront the lines we draw.</p>