Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers Review

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(More customer reviews)In Hotel Tiberius Sebastian Hope describes his long and circuitous search for family. The first half of this engaging investigation treats the grandfather he knew: Sir John Winthrop Hackett, a decorated and distinguished general in the British Army, who read Greats at Oxford and, while campaigning in the Middle East, wrote a dissertation on Saladin's campaign against the Principality of Antioch in 1188. At the age of sixteen, Hope discovers that Hackett was his adoptive grandfather. In the second, more painful part of the volume, the author gathers information on his newly-discovered but long-dead real grandfather, Fritz Grossmann. The Palestine of late Ottoman and British rule described in part one is well-known. In part two this familiar Palestine is displaced by the unfamiliar Palestine of German colonization. The German Society of Templers, a pietistic Christian group emerging from German Lutherans, sought to facilitate the Second Coming by living in Christ-like simplicity in Palestine. They established colonies in Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine late in the nineteenth century. The industriousness and enterprise of the Germans made their communities models for the later Jewish settlements. The Germans were also among the first to establish European-standard hotels in Palestine. The book's title names one of these, the Hotel Tiberius, established in 1894. The narrative traces the hotel's and its German proprietors' fates through World War I and II--involving internment, exile, expropriation. Hope does not succeed in answering all the questions that he has about his genealogy, but he does manage to find what he missed most in his childhood--the sense of belonging to an extended family. Hope's exposition of the tragedies of his family and of their Palestinian homeland is honest. The German nationalism of most the colonists and the Nazi affiliations of many are acknowledged and examined. The unfair and politically expedient treatment of the colonists by the Israeli government and by some of its academics is also documented. The author's disgust at the recent idiocy of American military intervention in the Middle East is also clear. Perhaps that is why this book is so difficult to find on Amazon.

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Part history, part travel journal, and part autobiography, this is a journey of many layers and resonances, as Sebastian Hope follows the tumultuous story of his family's hotel in Palestine. In 1900, Thomas Cook, who had been running tours of the Holy Land since the 1890s, financed the building of a hotel in Tiberias, the largest town on the Sea of Galilee, which had long been a stopover point for Christian pilgrims. The hotel, built, run, and eventually owned by Richard Grossmann, was situated in the Sanjak of Acre, part of the Ottoman Empire, and after World War I found itself in the British mandated territory of Palestine, prospering under British rule until World War II, after which the hotel was eventually confiscated by the fledgling state of Israel in 1948. With the hotel as the pivotal point in the story, Sebastian Hope researches the story of his grandmother, Margaret Frena and her two husbands, Fritz Grossman (Richard Grossman's son), who shot himself dead in 1938, the year Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, and John Winthrop Hackett (General Sir John Hackett) who served with the TransJordan Frontier Force. Journeying through Rhineland Germany, Turkey, and the Middle East, his research takes him to some strange places as he weaves a wonderful, strong family story into a rich, sweeping backdrop of both time and place. Just as he unravels the tumultuous history of the area, Hope digs deep into the history and layers of his own family, and discovers how family histories have an archaeology too.

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