I Pray You Will Be Safe

“I wonder if you ever have questioned the validity of your state…please tell your people to stop stealing our humanity.”

“I write to you of the hard days…but the truth is it feels almost shameful to mention these things to you after reading how hard you are fighting just for basic survival.”

The remarkable correspondence between two young women—one from Palestine and one from Israel—who developed an improbable friendship in the wake of October 7, for readers of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

In the early months of 2024, journalist Dimitri Krier reached out to an unlikely pair: Tala Albanna, a twenty-year-old from Gaza City, and Michelle Amzalak, a twenty-four-year-old from Sderot. Tala had never spoken to anyone from Israel; Michelle had never spoken to anyone from Gaza. Would they be willing to write to each other?

Both women said yes.

Over the course of a year and a half, Tala and Michelle opened up about their faith and families. They comforted and confided in each other—about their shared conviction that the atrocities in Palestine served only those in power, and then, about their dawning realization that if history could be rewritten, they might have had a very different relationship. With astonishing insight and testimonial power, I Pray You Will Be Safe is the border-transcending correspondence between two young women, united against one humanity’s darkest hours.

“A double diary that injects humanity where we all need it most. Supremely moving and fiercely staged. A singular work for a better world.” —David Treuer, New York Times bestselling author of The Savage Mind and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

• “I Pray You Will Be Safe is much more than a sum of letters from two human beings in crisis. It is a testament, a record, an archive, a wish, a hope—a double diary that injects humanity where we all need it most. Supremely moving and fiercely staged. A singular work for a better world.”
  David Treuer, New York Times bestselling author of THE SAVAGE MIND and the National Book Award finalist THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE
• “With clear-eyed candor and remarkable vulnerability, both women establish a rapport filled with respect, concern, and encouragement without glossing over the opposing claims, justifications, and appeals familiar even to those beyond the Middle East. …Unlike the rapid fire of news stories covering the current conflict or the online debates and sound bites from talking heads, Albanna and Amzalak’s letters offer a space for a more careful and caring glimpse at the humans whose lives and dreams have become the wreckage of self-serving narratives…brave and generous."
  Kirkus (starred review)
• "Frank, conversational missives... the women render hot-button political subjects on a human scale, discussing the genocide in Gaza, the deaths of Israeli hostages, and their own histories with their respective homelands—including that neither woman had ever spoken to someone from the other side of the border before...[a] vital dispatch."
  Publishers Weekly (starred review)