70,000: Poems

By Lenna Jawdat A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms Palestinian cultural erasure into an archive of grief, memory, and hope. 70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians. In response to this loss of cultural and intellectual heritage, Lenna Jawdat began handwriting the numbers one to 70,000, choosing to imagine each number as a book. Trained as a trauma therapist, she documented the emotional and physical experience of this ritual, tracing the grief, reverence, and endurance that surfaced through the process. This full-color book unfolds through three interwoven threads: the numbers themselves, reflections on the act of writing, and a personal and familial poetic narrative expressed in both image and verse. Together, they form a fragmented yet powerful archive—blending poetry, memoir, maps, documents, and collage. 70,000 is an embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience. What begins as a personal act of witnessing becomes a collective gesture toward remembrance, continuity, and the possibility of healing.

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