Mother of Strangers: A Novel - Hardcover

Amiry, Suad

 
9780593316559: Mother of Strangers: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059331655X ISBN 13: 9780593316559
Verlag: Pantheon, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR from NPR  • Set in Jaffa in between 1947 and 1951, this “fable-like historical novel of young love ... darkly humorous and touching” (Oprah Daily) is based on a true story during the beginning of the destruction of Palestine and displacement of its people.

Based on the true story of two Jaffa teenagers, Mother of Strangers follows the daily lives of Subhi, a fifteen-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the thirteen-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. In this prosperous and cosmopolitan port city, with its bustling markets, cinemas, and cafés on the hills overlooking the Mediter­ranean Sea, we meet many other unforgettable charac­ters as well, including Khawaja Michael, the elegant and successful owner of orange groves above the harbor; Mr. Hassan, the tailor who makes Subhi’s treasured English suit, which he hopes will change his life; and the very mischievous and outrageous Uncle Habeeb, who insists on introducing Subhi to the local bordello.
 
With a thriving orange export business, Jaffa had always been a city welcoming to outsiders—the “Mother of Strangers”—where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully together. Once the bombardment of the city begins in April 1948, Suad Amiry gives us the grim but fascinating details of the shock, panic, and destruc­tion that ensues. Jaffa becomes unrecognizable, with neighborhoods flattened, families removed from their homes and separated, and those who remain in constant danger of arrest and incarceration. Most of the popula­tion flees eastward to Jordan or by sea to Lebanon in the north or to Egypt and Gaza in the south. Subhi and Shams will never see each other again.
 
Suad Amiry has written a vivid and devastating ac­count of a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East—the beginning of the end of Palestine and a por­trait of a city irrevocably changed.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SUAD AMIRY is a writer and an architect. She is the author of six works of nonfiction, including Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, which was awarded the Viareggio-Versilia International Prize in 2004, and Golda Slept Here, which was awarded the Nonino Risit d’Aur Prize in 2014. Amiry received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and is the founder of the RIWAQ Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, where she lives.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1. The Best Mechanic in Town
(Jaffa, June 1947)
 
 
It took a few ascending yells—“Subhi! Subhi! Subhi! Goddamn, walak, Subhiii!”—before he showed signs of hearing his name. Half- heartedly, he raised his head and looked in the direction of his boss. At the entrance of the dark garage stood M’allem Mustafa with a new customer who was tall and elegant. It took Subhi a few long minutes before he silenced the deafening noise of the electrical generator he was repairing. From a distance, he lifted his palm as if to say “What?” In return, he received a beckoning hand gesture and a command: “Come here!”
 
Resenting the interruption, Subhi pointed to the dozens of dismantled engine pieces spread out on the smeared concrete floor under his feet. In line were other machines: water pumps, more electrical generators, and engines, all waiting to be fixed by the clever fifteen- year- old mechanic. Familiar with Subhi’s “not wanting to budge” body language, M’allem Mustafa yelled at him again.
 
“Subhi! Leave everything. Go wash your hands and face. I want you to accompany Khawaja Michael to his orange grove, his bayyara. There seems to be a problem with the irrigation system or the water pump in the big cistern.”
 
“Khawaja Michael,” mumbled Subhi to himself as he stared once more in the direction of the new customer, a well- built man dressed in a camel hair suit with a light brown fedora.
 
Khawaja Michael was standing with the strong midday light behind him, making it difficult for Subhi to see his face. The glare formed a halo around one of the richest men in the port city of Jaffa.
 
Khawaja Michael, Khawaja Michael . . . Where have I heard that name before? Subhi asked himself as he bent over the stone sink, rubbing the engine grease off his hands. Oh, of course, from my father, he remembered, then said aloud, “Khawaja Michael himself! What an honor.”
 
All of a sudden, Subhi recalled word for word an argument, more like a fight, he once had with his father in which Khawaja Michael’s name was mentioned.
 
“I love my job. If need be, I’ll do it for free,” Subhi had said in defense of his choice to leave school and work as a mechanic with M’allem Mustafa, the owner of the garage.
 
“For free? You son of a bitch. Who do you think you are? The son of Khawaja Michael?”
 
Subhi also recalled how his father had made fun of him for thinking Khawaja was Mr. Michael’s first name.
 
“La ya ibni, no, my son, Khawaja is not his first name. A Khawaja is a Christian or Jewish gentleman. But of course not all Christians and Jews are khawajat, only the rich among them. Some are as poor as your father, if not poorer.”
 
Subhi knew the poor among the Christians, the Jews, and the Muslims— including his Christian neighbors Abu and Um Yousef and Abu Ya’qoub, the Jewish porter at the Carmel Market— but he certainly didn’t know any of the rich khawajat.
 
“And what is a rich Muslim called?” Subhi asked his father.
 
“A rich man, I suppose!” his father responded with a smile.
 
Though excited to accompany one of the city’s richest merchants, who grew oranges and exported them to the whole world, Subhi was worried: What if I fail to fix the water system in one of the city’s largest and most prestigious bayyarat? What baffled Subhi most as he pulled up his stained baggy trousers and hurriedly walked across the garage in the direction of M’allem Mustafa and Khawaja Michael was why Khawaja himself had come to the Blacksmith Market, the Suq il Haddadeen, one of the poorest and shabbiest parts of town, where the garage was located, and had not sent his driver or one of the numerous men who worked for him instead. Khawaja Michael must have had dozens if not hundreds of men working in his groves, and just as many working in his orange export company. It was at this point that Subhi remembered his father describing Khawaja Michael as an isami, a self- made man. Only then did he understand the modesty of self- made men.
 
Unlike his older and younger brothers, Jamal and Amir, who worked with their father planting and tending for a number of orange groves to the east and southeast of Jaffa, Subhi had followed his passion— or rather, his obsession. From an early age, he had been dismantling and reassembling everything in sight, whether it was his grandfather’s Zenith radio, his father’s agricultural tools, his brothers’ bicycles, the neighbor children’s tricycle, his uncle’s horse carriage, or his younger siblings’ toys and dolls. He dismembered those toys into heads, arms, hands, legs. While the children cried frantically, older family members burst into laughter as they complimented him on his newly invented creatures, where one doll’s limbs were attached to another doll’s torso or an animal head to a human body or the like. Subhi would always restore the dolls and toys back to their original compositions, and then the screaming and yelling would stop.
 
Subhi’s father, Ismael— also called Abu Jamal, in reference to his eldest son— often asked him, “Why work for M’allem Mustafa when you could work with your own father?”
 
“The answer to your question is very simple,” replied Subhi.
 
“M’allem Mustafa pays me thirty piastres a day, while you pay my brothers nothing.”
 
“Nothing, ya ‘ars, you bastard? Nothing? Don’t I give you and your siblings a roof over your heads and a mattress to sleep on? Don’t your mother and your grandmother spend their days and nights washing and boiling your greasy clothes and cooking for you? You call that nothing? What else can a poor man like me do for his kids? Let’s see how far your thirty piastres a day get you. I bet you’ll end up a bachelor just like your uncle!”
 
“What’s wrong with Uncle Habeeb? Isn’t he having fun staying out late in Tel Aviv most nights?”
 
“Is that the kind of life you aspire to, son?”
 
Subhi’s father was referring to his youngest brother, who, in spite of the little work he did and the little money he earned, managed to lead a rather wild life in the bars and nightclubs of Tel Aviv. He also spent most of his weekends in the Arab and Jewish brothels located along the Jaffa– Tel Aviv Road frequented by British soldiers and Jews.
 
“But doesn’t Uncle Habeeb say he’s making use of his good relationships with the British soldiers he meets in the brothels to change their government’s policy toward Jewish immigration to Palestine?”
 
“What nonsense. We see more and more ships full of Jewish immigrants arriving at the Tel Aviv Port every week. If neither the 1929 nor 1936 revolts managed to change British immigration policy, do you think your drunken uncle and the drunken British soldiers in the same brothel could?”
 
“Why not?” asked Subhi, who was enjoying one of his first man-to-man conversations with his father.
 
“Why not? Everybody goes on strike against the British bias toward the Zionists except those sharameet, those whores, and their karakhanat, their brothels. War or peace, they never shut their doors.”
 
“But wasn’t the brothel...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059331655X
ISBN 13 
9780593316559
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780593466940: Mother of Strangers: A Novel

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0593466942 ISBN 13:  9780593466940
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023
Softcover