Susan Slyomovics's Object of Memory explores the ways in which Arabs and Jews (primarily Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews) narrate the Palestinian village, focusing on the pre-1948 Palestinian village of Ein Houd, located in the Carmel Mountains south of the city of Haifa. The Palestinian inhabitants of Ein Houd were displaced during the 1948 war and prevented by the Israeli government from returning to their homes there. Most of them became internal refugees, designated “present absentees” under Israeli law. Others became refugees in surrounding Arab states and in the part of Palestine that became known as the West Bank. Their properties were confiscated by Israel under the Absentee Property Law.