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> Letter from refugee Aida Camp, Bethlehem, 2008
> Salt of this Sea: Important announcement
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> Letter Dheisha from Larissa Shaterian
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> Letter Sam Bahour's daughter, Ramallah
> Mary’s anger
> Once Upon a Winter Night
> Review of identity: a couple's conversation
> The Christmas Gate, Christmas in Bethlehem, 2006
> Letter Sam Bahour, on Israeli incursion into Ramallah
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> Diary from Arroub: Islam Turk
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Donn Hutchison
Source:
Jerusalem Quarterly
Fall 2006
Issue 28
In the 23 years I knew him, he seemed to be overbearing, manipulative, critical and opinionated. There were glimpses of his humour and smatterings of his compassion, but they seemed as a mirage must seem in the desert. They took me by surprise, and afterwards I wondered if they had really existed at all.
Very little of the bright, sensitive peasant boy remained in the doctor I knew. The little boy who use to weave ‘ubi with his older brother Issa, and fashion baskets out of dried grape vines, or lay under the stars in his father’s vineyard and dream of a fine stone house where the roof didn’t leak and where the smoke from the cooking fire didn’t irritate his mother’s eyes, seemed buried in the man I knew as father-in-law and grandfather to my children.
After Jirius Mansur’s death, I found among his things a copybook filled with Arabic poetry that he had written, the rough draft of a romance novel about a young Arab doctor named Ramzi, and his autobiography. In the pages of his autobiography, the story of the poor, young, peasant boy in qumbaz and tarboosh, speaking only the village dialect, transforms into the doctor he was to become: fluent in five languages, sophisticated, prosperous. It is a chronicle that rounds out the picture of the man I knew. It speaks of a boy who dreamed dreams as he stared at those stars in his father’s vineyard those many years ago, who was a romantic, who wrote beautiful poetry and lyrics to songs that spoke of his devotion to his wife and daughters, who was sensitive and caring and kind. Through the pages of his autobiography, I saw a man so different from the man I thought I knew.
His story is one of a peasant boy, a young intern at the American University in Beirut (AUB), a horse-riding doctor in the Trans-Jordanian Frontier Force.
It is a diary of courtship and arranged marriages, of the beautiful green-eyed blonde of romance fiction marrying your brother. It is a journal of doctoring among the Bedouin of Beer Sheba, of building a villa in Jerusalem, and living through the period of the King David and Semiramis hotel bombings, of the fleeing from Katamon, of Hitler and Palestine.
For the remainder of the article, see:
http://www.jerusalemquarterly.org/details.php?cat=2&id=230
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