East of the Sun: A Memoir

By Noha Shaath Ismail

A coming-of-age tale, family saga, and nostalgic view of the fifties and sixties, Noha Shaath Ismail's memoirs describe her formative years in Alexandria, Egypt, and the personal journey that lead her to the United States in 1970. International in scope, universal in outlook,her story is set against the backdrop of political and social upheaval. She writes about the loss of her homeland, Nasser's Egypt, and the tumultuous 1960s in Philadelphia with lots of insightful reminiscences about her family and her rapidly changing world. Read about Ismail's Palestinian father, Lebanese mother, Egyptian husband, and American sons, and be touched by a complex multitude of emotions - tenderness, pride, love, sadness and yearning.

Here is an immigrant's tale with stories about Muslim traditions, courting habits, and a way of life that has since disappeared. Here are also the recollections of a world traveler spurred by View-Master images her father shared with her after overseas trips, who like Sindbad longed for a taste of adventure and the freedom to begin her own journey of discovery. Not least, here is the world view of a strong-minded woman of the world, whose home is Palestine, Egypt, Minnesota, Florida, everywhere, and whose personal story about loss, grace, and memory can inform our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467041133

Noha Shaath Ismail

Noha Shaath Ismail was born in Palestine in 1942 and spent her childhood and young adult years in Alexandria, Egypt. She attended private British schools in Alexandria, and graduated from the University of Alexandria with a Bachelor's degree in English Literature. She came to the United States for graduate studies where she acquired a Master's Degree in Library Science from Drexel University in Philadelphia. She immigrated to the U.S. with her husband and two young children in 1970, and spent her entire career with The Hennepin County Library System in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Noha Shaath Ismail is currently retired and lives with her husband in Fort Myers, Florida and Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren,

Emma, Alex, Hannah, and Sophie,

that they may honor the East

as well as the West of their inheritance

Acknowledgements

I worked on the memoir for a number of years trying to jar my memory by looking at faded photographs and old notes and clippings that had crossed many borders with me, and finally writing and rewriting the text. Throughout this process my number one supporter was my husband Ismail, who steadfastly and lovingly provided me with the space, patience, and encouragement I needed to stay the course. I should also mention with gratitude the helpful comments and suggestions I received from my sister-in-law Laila and my brother Nadim Shaath who followed this project with keen interest from the very beginning.Likewise I must acknowledge the genuine support of my cousin Safwan Tannir who lives thousands of miles away from me in Dubai, yet kept in touch by e-mail and eagerly read and commented on every chapter. To my friend and mentor Chris Dodge I owe many thanks for helping me edit the final manuscript and prepare it for publication. Finally, my thanks goes out to all of my friends who took the time to read my manuscript and gave me the feedback and encouragement I needed to move it out of my inner circle and give it a life of its own.

Preface

The thought of writing my memoirs came to me soon after my son Tarek was married in August of 1994. I had survived a heart attack and triple bypass surgery a few months prior to his wedding. The combined effect of those two life-altering events triggered a natural inclination on my part to take stock of my life and try to understand the forces that had shaped it thus far.

One of the first things I felt a need to address was the fateful decision that my husband and I had made twenty-five years earlier to leave our country and extended family for a new life in America. At first we viewed our coming to the United States as a big adventure, and thought that at some point we were going to wrap it up neatly and return to Egypt where we belonged. But after time I began to see how naïve we were in making that assumption. By then we had raised our family and spent most of our productive years in Minnesota. Our two boys were grown up and getting on with their lives. Ismail was about to retire, and I was having to come to terms with my own mortality. It was suddenly clear to me that we were not going to return to Egypt when we grew old. The truth was that we were going to spend the rest of our lives in the United States along with our children and future generations of Ismails after us. Why that revelation came as a surprise to me, I don’t know. But it did put me off balance, perhaps because we had never planned for this outcome.

I began to think seriously about the prospect of having grand-

children in America. They would add so much joy and beauty to my world. I couldn’t wait to get to know them and see them grow and prosper. I knew that I could meet them in their own little world, but would they be able to meet me in mine? I told myself that it would be up to Ismail and me to tell them about our world and their rich Arab heritage. But after we are gone, would they still remember? In my heart I knew that someday the line of connection to their Arab roots would be severed. It pained me to contemplate the likelihood that those roots will be shrouded in darkness and forgotten. The more I thought about it, the more I was overcome by a powerful sense of responsibility to preserve that delicate and precious link.

When you are the sole keeper of a culture, your roots get all tangled up with your heartstrings, and that is exactly how I felt. I understood perfectly that my grandchildren would lead American lives, and I truly wanted them to be proud of the United States and its vibrant young history. But I also wanted them not to forfeit the dignity of their roots and to honor their Arab inheritance. I yearned to convey to them that they were part of a long chain of humanity extending deep into the Arab Middle East as well as the West. Egypt must mean more to them than a picture of three pyramids on a postcard, and Palestine must have more significance to them than being the cradle of the world’s three great religions. The only way I knew how to do that was by writing a memoir. I wanted them to know our innermost thoughts and how they shaped our lives. I also wanted to give them an incisive and personal look into our world so that they might understand where we came from. I promised myself that I would make that my primary objective upon retirement.

For the next ten years the thought of writing a memoir continued to seduce and tantalize me. Finally, when the time came for me to put pen to paper, I began to sift through the fragments of a life lived on three continents and attempt to reconstruct it as faithfully as I could. I let the memories flow, and trusted that they would deliver me to the time and place of my youth. In my mind I visited the sights, smells, and sounds of my old world. The images of my parents and siblings, friends, neighbors, and large family gatherings laughing and arguing, stayed with me for months. As much as I enjoyed savoring the romance of the past, I tried to resist allowing myself to bask in the warm glow of nostalgia for long. I knew that I had to narrow my lens, leaving only the images that stood out in my memory and refused to fade away. This is the memoir that I will leave for my grandchildren in the hope that it will capture the essence of the world I inhabited before I arrived in the United States. I have tried to give an honest picture of what it was like for me growing up in the Arab world, and touch on past events only where it seemed necessary to stop and look around in order to understand the present.

Chapter 1

Crossing Borders

Most people are aware of one home, but I am aware of three. I was born in Palestine, grew up in Egypt, and have spent most of my adult years in the United States. As a consequence, I have spent the better part of my life trying to figure out where I fit into this world. While I have a strong sense of attachment to all three countries, an ideal sense of belonging has always eluded me. When people ask about my background, I always find it difficult to answer the question since I can seldom get by with a single response. If I am asked for my place of birth, it is Palestine, but there is no longer such a country on the map. If I am asked about my passport, I used to say that I was Syrian, but I never lived in Syria. I am fluent in English, but my speech has a slight accent, so when I have responded to the same question later by indicating that I am an American, I immediately got a follow-up query: But where was I really from? Ah, the million dollar question!

What am I supposed to say? That I have a Palestinian father, a Lebanese mother, an Egyptian husband, and two American sons? The fact is that all of these identities are braided in my brain and it is always difficult to untangle the strands. Even the Arab in me is problematic, since I am always struggling with dialects. I find myself instinctively speaking Palestinian Arabic at home, Egyptian Arabic with my friends, and Lebanese Arabic with my relatives in Lebanon. Our divided cultural identity is perhaps best exemplified in an exchange my brother Nabeel once had with a family friend. She had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and after he responded that he wanted to be an ambassador, she replied for what country?

My original homeland, Palestine, was taken away from me early on. I lost my country and my national identity, and I spent my entire life hitched to a place that did not appear on the map. I don’t have many recollections of my early childhood in Palestine, as I was only four when we left. Only fuzzy snapshots of settings remain: a round basin in the garden of our house in Jaffa that was filled with bright red goldfish; a jasmine shrub next to the gate; a hospital ward full of children crying in cribs; and me dressed up as an angel, standing center stage in an auditorium filled with people. But the notion that I am a person without a country haunts me daily. Twisted images of horrified children, bulldozed homes, and wretched refugee camps continue to intrude on my present to remind me that I am a part of this collective.

When I returned to Palestine for the first time in 1988, I was filled with intense emotion and anticipation at the thought of visiting the land of my birth, the homeland that had been denied me all of my life. Upon my arrival, I was immediately escorted to the Palestinian interrogation room by Israeli airport police. Who are you and what is the purpose of your visit? They kept asking. They held me for almost an hour, with different interrogators asking a host of questions designed to make me feel like an intruder in my ancestral home. I woke up early the next morning and walked the streets of old Jerusalem, and I remember being struck by the realization that all the men, women, and children around me spoke the Palestinian dialect. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I was with my own people at last. I happily lost myself in a maze of tunnels, stairs, and alleys, but everywhere I went I was confronted by the Israeli military presence. The residents came and went under the gaze of soldiers carrying machine guns in the streets, in watch towers and on rooftops. I wondered what it would take for someone to live under constant military surveillance. What does occupation do to one’s soul?

I went to visit my old house in Jaffa. The car drew to the front gate and I took a long, somber look at the weather-beaten house that had by then been converted into a drug rehabilitation center. Gone was the beautiful garden with its water basin filled with golden guppies. Gone was the fragrant jasmine over the garden gate. The area surrounding the house was dry, brown, and largely covered by a small parking lot. It had the air of an Arab home that had been violated by subsequent history. I got out of the car and stood there in a daze, unable to venture inside the building or to introduce myself to the kindly gentleman who was waving me in from a distance. I thought of the sepia photos that my father had assembled of his life in Palestine in the family album. There he was as a young father proudly holding his firstborn in an orange grove in Safad. In another set of pictures he was seated with colleagues at the Ameriyeh High School in Jaffa, not too far from our house. I visited Safad and Jaffa in an effort to recapture the world my father loved and longed for till his dying days. He had reserved the warmest remembrances for Lake Tabaria, and he had several photos taken on the water’s edge. When I went there, I found myself studying every house to try to determine its age. If it looked older than fifty years, it belonged to the Tabaria that my father knew and I would then wrap my eyes around it. But I could not shake the feeling that my father would not recognize any of those cities now. I left with a feeling of emptiness and frustration. While I experienced a profound sense of connection to the land, I could not bring myself to call this place home. The haven that I had fantasized about all of my life slipped away from me inexplicably. But I knew that it was bound to materialize again beyond reach. I still nurse the doleful feeling that no matter where I am, no matter where I go, I will always carry an elsewhere inside me. And while that elsewhere may not mean anything to the world at large, I share it with ten million other people on this planet who collectively cling to their Palestinian consciousness and refuse to let go.

My second home was in Alexandria, Egypt, and it is the one that is closest to my heart. It is the world of my growing up years and its memory fills me with unabashed nostalgia. It represents in my mind the warm and unconditionally accepting space of home. I often go back to Alexandria in my dreams. I choose the company I wish to keep and the places I want to visit. I dream of the sea and the sound of clapping waves. I dream of hot summer days and the pianola man selling fresca—a popular, thin, round, sweet biscuit that could only be found along the beaches of Alexandria. I dream of joyful clusters of red dates hanging from the stately palm, the taste of juicy, ripe mangoes, and the fresh smell of jasmine and basil. I dream of sidewalk cafes, blue double-decker streetcars, and villas with gardens overflowing with oleander and bougainvillea. Alexandria was a city of many languages and people of different ethnic backgrounds, and it is there that my Eastern and Western worlds converged.

Sadly, the Alexandria of my youth is now gone. The city, once so beautifully lined with lacy trees, is now totally devoid of color as the trees have all been replaced by a wasteland of concrete. While I was growing up, the city’s population stood at around two million. Now that number has more than tripled and Alexandria is bursting at the seams. In the rush to build new apartment blocks to house all those who came from neighboring small towns and villages, developers have knocked down beautiful villas and elegant apartment buildings and replaced them with cheaply constructed buildings that have grown helter-skelter in every direction. Most of the beautiful parks have disappeared and the streets are congested at all hours of the day, clogged by a ceaseless crawl of cars, trucks, and buses all honking at the same time, with hardly any rules governing the flow of traffic. The changes have been so dramatic that when I return on my occasional visits I have a hard time recognizing my own neighborhood. I once went back to check on my childhood home in the Ramleh district, and my heart ached as I surveyed the clutter that surrounded it. Our beautiful house just stood there, with its dignity assaulted and its integrity totally gone.

The arc of history has been unkind to my beloved city, taking it on a long slow slide from an elegant multicultural city teeming with charm and warmth to a rundown metropolis on the Mediterranean. Even its celebrated history as the second city in the Roman Empire seems irrelevant now for it looks like it has been built yesterday. But while I recognize that the ruthless ebb and flow of time must take its course, I still cling to the thought that Alexandria cannot possibly turn its back permanently on its glorious past. I want to believe that it will sparkle once again under the same clear azure sky and alongside the same glimmering waters that inspired Alexander to build his magnificent metropolis in the first place.

My third home is perhaps the most complex of the three intersecting cultural spheres that have characterized my life. I have lived in the United States for most of my adult years. It is where my husband and I happily raised our family and fulfilled our professional aspirations. It is where we were free to live the life we chose for ourselves in a stable, relaxed, and safe environment, and it is where we have been able to retire comfortably in a pleasant climate by the sea. It is also where I enjoyed rights and obligations as a full-fledged citizen for the first time in my life. I still remember the thrill of walking into a voting booth during the 1980 presidential elections. I had carefully examined the platforms of the two political parties and determined that my social values and political compass were more in tune with the Democratic Party, so I voted for Jimmy Carter. Even though he lost to Ronald Reagan, I felt extremely empowered because I honestly believed that my vote counted. I have never lost that enthusiasm or the feeling of wonderment over the American democratic process. My profound attachment to the home of my adulthood is real and unadulterated, and I like to think that I have contributed to my adopted country as much as I have benefited from it.

On a personal level, however, life in America has not always been easy for an immigrant like me who has persistently wrestled with issues of cultural ambiguity. I had come far into a foreign land and quickly discovered that I had to confront a daunting new challenge in my life. Instead of straddling multiple Arab identities, I now found myself having to bridge the cultural divide between East and West, and between Islam and Christianity. I led a perfectly normal American life, yet I was emotionally linked with another world five thousand miles away. Having to cross that invisible divide between my two worlds daily was truly exhausting. It was also disconcerting, because it always felt like I was on the margin of both.

What has complicated the situation for me has been the realiza-

tion that my Palestinian background clashed stridently with my new American self. I had acquired the fresh new identity of Arab American—and it was very difficult not to be aware of the sharp dichotomy inherent in this status. It did not take very long for me to discover the groundless prejudice that exists in the United States against everything Palestinian. The strong reluctance on the part of the American public to recognize that we have rights or acknowledge that an injustice has been done to my people was impossible to ignore. The result was that my Palestinian consciousness quickly assumed a strong sense of urgency with me, and I found that I had no choice but to become involved in the debate over the issue of war and peace in the Middle East. It was also painful for me to feel the need to explain myself all the time, and to keep asserting the fact that I do have a history and a distinctive culture that I am proud of. So for most of my life in America, I have been an advocate for a people who have no voice in the concourse of public opinion. As much as I hated to admit it, sometimes I felt like I belonged to two irreconcilable identities.

I am not sure that I ever felt fully integrated in any of the countries I lived in. I often find myself responding to a space, rather than belonging to it. I suspect that many of those who have crossed borders in this mobile and transparent world can identify with that sentiment. As we relate to new allegiances—to in-laws, neighbors, friends, and coworkers—we come to the realization that no culture is absolute. At the end of the day, we find that we all share similar subliminal values that transcend time and place. So while going home is what some of us try to do throughout our lives, it seems to me that we should think of home not as a place we go to or come from, not as something inherent in the world, but as a place we carry inside ourselves. Home is ultimately a portable concept. When I traveled to visit my family in Egypt I was going home, and when I came back to Minnesota I was returning home. This incongruous state of mind is something that many of us have experienced. Therefore, it does not really matter where one chooses to call home. What does matter is our ability to cultivate a comfortable and joyful place on this earth. Being at peace with one’s self and with the world at large is what gives form and focus to our mental and emotional lives. It has taken me a lifetime to finally understand the true meaning of the old adage: home is where the heart is.

Chapter 2

Alexandria: City of My Youth

Growing