Intimate Stranger: Nomi Stone on Djerba
From Tablet Magazine
Shortly after finishing college, the poet Nomi Stone went to live on the Tunisian island of Djerba, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. In this Vox Tablet podcast, she talks with Tablet about her poetry collection The Stranger's Notebook, which grew out of the notes she kept there.
Djerba
An ancient community
For centuries, Djerba's Jews, many of them from priestly families, lived alongside the island's Muslim majority in two villages, keeping traditions that reach back to ancient times. Relations between the communities grew strained in the twentieth century, and in 2002 an attack linked to Al Qaeda killed visitors at the island's famous El Ghriba synagogue.
The poems
Notes from a stranger
Stone arrived in 2003, a year after the attack. She recorded her friendships, the community's religious customs, and the shifting ways neighbors saw one another and saw her, an outsider, and later shaped these notes into poems.
This summary was written by JIMENA and is based on a Vox Tablet podcast episode with Nomi Stone, published by Tablet Magazine. The original belongs to Tablet.
