By Suad Amiry, Pantheon Books, 2022, hardcover, 344 pp. MEB $27
Reviewed by Ida Audeh
SUAD AMIRY’S first work of fiction is nominally a story of thwarted teenage romance told against the backdrop of the fall of Jaffa and the surrounding villages in 1948, when Israel was created and Palestine was violently dismembered. The narrative covers a four-year period beginning in June 1947, as tensions were building in the period before the end of the British Mandate, and ending in 1951, with the Palestinians who remained in Jaffa corralled into a ghetto trying to find their way as an unwanted minority in a triumphalist Jewish state.
Mother of Strangers describes graphically one of the consequences of forcible exile during war—not only the (obvious) loss of home and town, but also the fragmentation of nuclear families. Amiry offers as much historical background as the uninitiated reader needs to understand the unfolding events. But even readers who understand the loss of Palestine in geopolitical terms may not be familiar with how an abstract concept like settler colonialism plays out in the lives of its victims. The book makes the human consequences painfully clear.
Anyone familiar with even the broad contours of Palestine’s 20th century history knows from the opening pages that 15-year-old lovestruck Subhi is going to be disappointed in his pursuit of Shams, the 13-year-old village girl of his dreams. Our knowledge of the disaster that awaits Jaffa in 1948 infuses our reading with sadness for the earnest, hormone-driven teenager who thinks that with the right suit he can win the girl’s heart. We suspect (correctly as it turns out) that he will never have a chance to find out.
Jaffa, too, doesn’t stand a chance. Nicknamed “the mother of strangers,” a tribute to its hospitality, the city has another nickname, “the bride of the sea,” and that is the metaphor that comes to life in the first part of the novel. Amiry reclaims and maps Jaffa as it once was, before it was taken over by newcomers determined to erase all traces of its original residents. She recreates communities and streets that no longer exist: the cafes, neighborhoods of note, the names of families who owned orange groves. She describes the political discussion that dominated Palestinian life in the months before the Nakba and the class differences between city people and villagers. Regional traditions come to life in the cluster of chapters that end part one, in which Amiry describes the Nabi Rubin season, a much-anticipated period on the calendar that drew thousands of area residents to the shrine of the prophet Rubin. For three weeks or so, families took to the coast and camped out, barbecuing their food and enjoying the carnival atmosphere and sea breeze.
Part two begins in January 1948, and describes a sequence of atrocities that contributed to the mass panic and flight in April of that year. After the city’s fall, demoralized and defeated Jaffans watch helplessly as Arab homes are looted methodically by organized Jewish gangs. They become a barely tolerated minority in their own country.
In parts three and four, people are on the move, trying to escape Israel’s clutches while searching for their loved ones. Shams and her sisters are separated from their parents during the chaos of the flight from Jaffa, and as the parents separate to look for their daughters among groups of refugees, borders tighten; Shams never sees her mother again. Subhi is separated from his family and ends up in Jordan. His rakish uncle lives in the new state until circumstances force him to leave for Lebanon, but even there he is not safe; he is killed in combat when Israel invades that country in 1982.
The circumstances that prompted Amiry to write this book are revealed at the end, lending a twist to an already moving story. The daughter of a refugee who grew up in Jaffa and never got over the loss of his home, the author made the trek to Jaffa decades later to find it, but the guidance she was given was insufficient in a state that makes it a point to obliterate all traces of Palestinian life predating 1948. When a cab driver learned of her unsuccessful search, he introduced her to his aunt, who is none other than the real-life Shams, whose story led Amiry to track down Subhi, living in a refugee camp in Jordan.
Whereas Amiry had intended to write a personal account about the search for her father’s home, she was led to a bigger story: the fall of Jaffa and the loss of Palestine as experienced by two teenagers who survived the catastrophe but lost a great deal in the process. Now grandparents, they were willing to talk about the trauma they experienced, which the author’s father had never been willing to do.
Mother of Strangers describes the price paid in human lives when exclusivist states are created violently. It is also the story of refugees around the globe—and there are so many of them today, fleeing war, poverty, gang violence, climate catastrophe—forced to abandon everything that roots them and to find their footing in an often hostile or at best indifferent world.
Ida Audeh is a contributing editor of the Washington Report.
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