Writer Transforms Ottoman-Era Akko Home Into Artists' Retreat

This week in Israel, a local Muslim family will have an engagement party in the stone courtyard of an Ottoman-era house recently purchased and renovated by a Jewish writer in the old coastal city of Akko. Since the family’s nearby home is too small to host such an event, Israeli-American writer Evan Fallenberg, at the request of the family, offered up his space. Fallenberg’s Akko home is central to a project he’s calling “Arabesque”—the house will serve as an artists’ retreat, exhibition space, bed-and-breakfast, and general hangout for Akko’s residents and its visitors.

The engagement party is exactly the sort of authentic, organic gathering Fallenberg—who is among a new group of Jewish buyers to this largely Arab neighborhood—is seeking to foster at the Arabesque arts and residency center. Events at the venue will be advertised in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, and the managers of the property will be Fallenberg’s son, Micha, along with an Arab neighbor, Maharan Abu Stelly. But Fallenberg will not call this a coexistence project. “When people say “coexistence” it’s doomed to failure,” Fallenberg told me. “I am kind of shying away from that agenda. But underneath it all it’s really important to me. I want to appeal to everybody.”

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