Personal Witness : Israel Through My Eyes by Eban, Abba - 1993

Jonathan Cape, 1993. Hardcover. Good/Good. 6.5" x 9.5. H/B 671 pages, condition is Good, this is an ex library book with the usual stamps, the flyleaf has been removed. The companion volume to the Channel 4 five-part series Israel: A Nation Is Born - a personal account of Israel since its founding by a man who, as statesman, diplomat, scholar, and writer, has been at or near the center of events for the entire period. During the entire forty-odd years since the state of Israel came into existence, Abba Eban has been playing key roles in its public affairs. Probably no other Israeli citizen has been involved in so many different aspects of his country's modern history, known so many famous figures at home and abroad, or - and this is of prime importance - has such a powerful and eloquent command of language. Call it memoir or history (and Personal Witness really is both), Eban on Israel is an extraordinary pairing of writer and subject - pointed, knowledgeable, alive with anecdote and color, and intensely personal. Here are dozens of great men and women seen close up: Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, Attlee and Bevin, DeGaulle, Truman and Eisenhower, Molotov and Lyndon Johnson and Anwar Sadat. Eban takes us into the dangerous drama of Israel's founding, when 'Israel held the joy of birth and the fear of death in a single taste', as seen from the perspective of the fledgling United Nations where he represented his country; through the successive wars and diplomatic contre­temps in which he frequently found himself a major spokesman and policy maker; and on into the maturity of the Israeli state and the pressures that inspire and trouble it today. Along the way come splendid sidelights: meetings with President Truman ('If there was such a thing as an "imperial presidency," no one seemed to have broken the news to Harry S Truman')... working things out with Golda Meir ('Golda and I reached unprecedented harmony by agreeing on one point: that she and I would be happy and creative in proportion to the geographic distance separating us from each other') ... trying (unsuccessfully) to convince Albert Einstein to become president of Israel. And through­out there is the drumroll of great events, recounted with all of the precision, style and eloquence that has made Eban one of the most admired speakers of our time. Heritage: Civilisation and the Jews, published in 1985 in conjunction with a television series, was Abba Eban's enormously successful account of the history of the Jewish people up to 1948. Personal Witness takes up the story where Heritage left off, and docs so with a vividness and sense of detail no ordinary historian could command. Indispensable as history, irresistable as memoir, it is a book for anyone who cares about Israel and her people.