“I believe stories can open hearts, deepen understanding, and bring people closer across even the deepest divides.”
Nasser Dasht Peyma was born in 1961 in Tabriz, a historic city in northwestern Iran shaped by layers of culture, language, and faith. He holds a PhD from Panjab University in Chandigarh, India, and has taught literature and supervised graduate research in Iran and India, including at Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch, and Shoolini University. His academic and creative work has long been rooted in a belief that literature can open dialogue across cultures, histories, and identities.
After moving to Canada, he chose to devote himself more fully to creative writing. His published work spans scholarship, translation, drama, and fiction, including How to Study Modern Drama, Postcolonial Drama, Golnaz and Golyar, Echoes of the Unbound Sky, and Eco-Literature and Environmental Advocacy: Bridging Theory and Practice.
Across both scholarship and storytelling, his work reflects a sustained commitment to literature as a bridge between past and present, self and other, division and hope.
I wrote Bridges of Jerusalem in response to the long and painful history of violence in the Middle East and, more broadly, to the way violence shapes how we see one another. In contexts marked by conflict, people are often reduced to identities, to positions, and to simplified narratives that leave very little room for genuine human encounter.
Jerusalem became the natural setting for this story. It is not only a place, but also a historical and symbolic center of overlapping religious, political, and cultural conflicts. It carries centuries of memory and tension, all concentrated into daily life. That is why I chose it.
In Jerusalem, the boundary between the personal and the historical almost disappears. Every relationship and every conversation is touched by something larger than itself. In many ways, Bridges of Jerusalem emerges from this very tension, seeking to explore whether connection can exist where division seems inevitable.
Within that setting, I placed the story at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, because I see the university as one of the few spaces where dialogue is still possible, where people from different backgrounds can meet, question, and listen. It becomes a kind of microcosm of the wider world, but also a space where something different might begin.
Through Ahuva and Habib, and through the other characters who surround them, each shaped by their own histories, beliefs, and limitations, Bridges of Jerusalem attempts to resist the tendency to turn people into symbols. Instead, it seeks to show individuals in their complexity: vulnerable, searching, and often uncertain, yet still capable of connection.
This is where literature and art become essential. For me, literature creates a space where we can encounter the other without the immediate pressures of judgment or reaction. It slows us down, invites us to listen, and allows us to inhabit perspectives that are not our own. In that sense, Bridges of Jerusalem is also an attempt to create such a space, a quiet form of resistance to reduction, restoring depth where the world often demands simplification.
The novel is not trying to resolve conflict or offer answers. Rather, Bridges of Jerusalem asks a quieter but more difficult question: whether it is still possible for two people to truly encounter one another, not as representatives of history, but as human beings, while still carrying that history within them. It also asks whether a sense of ethical responsibility to the other can still exist in a world that so often pushes us toward division and certainty.
“In that sense, Bridges of Jerusalem is less about conflict itself and more about what remains possible in spite of it.”
– Nasser
