Jonathan Garfinkel hears a curious, touching story about a house in Jerusalem that is shared by a Palestinian and a Jew. As he starts to question the assumptions of his faith and Zionist teachings of his youth, he is impelled to make his first-ever trip to Israel—and the West Bank—and to confront the truths and myths of his upbringing. This provocative, deeply compassionate memoir is about connections and separations—about the perils of what links us and the distortions in what divides us. Vivid and dramatic in style, with unexpected moments of both comedy and pathos, Ambivalence is as much a portrait of life as it is of the Middle East.

JONATHAN GARFINKEL is an award-winning author. His plays include Cockroach (adapted from the novel by Rawi Hage) and House of Many Tongues, nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. The controversial The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret has been performed across Canada, Russia, Ukraine, and Germany. He is the author of the poetry collection Glass Psalms and the chapbook Bociany. His memoir, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide, has been published in numerous countries to wide critical acclaim, and his long-form nonfiction has appeared in the Walrus, Tablet, the Globe and Mail, and PEN International, as well as Cabin Fever: An Anthology of the Best New Canadian Non-Fiction. Named by the Toronto Star as “one to watch,” Garfinkel is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of Medical and Health Humanities at the University of Alberta, where he is writing a memoir about life with type 1 diabetes and the revolutionary open-source Loop artificial pancreas system. He lives in Berlin and Toronto.

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