LITMIR.BIZ

An enchanting tale of travels among South East Asia’s Sea Gypsies, scattered groups of semi-nomadic fisher people who occupy the spaces between the islands.A glance at the map of South East Asia reveals more blue than green, more sea than land. By separating the islands of the Malay Archipelago the sea has created diversity; by joining them together it has enabled trade and laid them open to influences from China, India and the Middle East. All Malays were sailors once – their ancestors reached the islands by boat – and the sea holds a central place in the Malay experience and imagination.The Sea Gypsies who still occupy this realm seem to live still in the hidden world of Conrad’s tales. They form social co-operative groups, each with its own territory, and move between established anchorages within that range, following the changing currents, seasons and fishing opportunities, and are specialists at exploiting the coral reefs. They have an oral tradition which accounts for their origins with myths of floods and tidal waves. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and a belief system that is at root a blend of animism, ancestor worship and sympathetic magic are characteristics they share with the early Malay cultures.Sebastian Hope travels and lives with groups of Sea Gypsies in both the east and the west of South East Asia, experiencing their subsistence lifestyle, unchanged for centuries. Travelling to fish and fishing to live, like the Sea Gypsies themselves he relies solely on his skills as a sailor and fisherman to survive.

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Part history, part travel journal and part autobiography, ‘Hotel Tiberias’ 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 the First World War found itself in the British mandated territory of Palestine, prospering under British rule until the Second World War, 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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