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Editorial Review Product Description
Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem and studied in Cairo and the United States. She is the author of Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Beirut. ... Read more Customer Reviews (5) 
Nostalgia
I grew up in Cairo and now living in the US. I loved this book so much and relate to every word of it. I would defintely recommend it to my son to read in the future as it is a beautiful mix of sociology, history and psycology.
Arab Women
The social history and politics of Arab women illustrated by the author's love for her mother and grandmother.
memoir tells the story of three generations of Arab women
Makdisi's memoir carefully collects fine details of the Arab Christian history in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. In tracing her mother and grandmother's and her own personal story and the families that surrounded them, Makdisi takes the reader on a journey that shows the meaningfulness of geographical origin in the arab culture as well as the inherent ability to change, transform and relocate.
This memoir presents an opportunity to encounter in a very human way the event of the partition of Palestine and its effects on families' lives. It is broad in scope touching on everything from questions of class, the situation of women, colonialism, raising a family in a time of war, social movements and the upheaval of governments, being stateless, suffering loss...
This book is recommended to the patient reader who is serious about garnering a deeper understanding of this area of the world or the related subject matter in women's studies.
It is worth noting that Makdisi is the sister of Edward Said. I didn't realize this myself until many many pages into the book.
A personal view of history through the eyes of family and change
The impetus for this lively, emotionally engaging exploration of three generations in Makdisi's maternal line came from her conflicted feelings about feminism and the traditional domestic-centered woman's role as well as the friction between the two cultural influences in her life - East and West.
Her father was an affluent Christian Palestinian who immigrated to the US and became an American citizen. He returned to Jerusalem to honor his mother's dying wish, "but never really forgave her for deflecting him from what he had seen as his destiny in the New World." Her mother was Lebanese and Palestinian, the daughter of a strict Baptist minister and his European-mission educated wife (Teta) who was, in turn, daughter of an Evangelical pastor.
Makdisi and her siblings (which include the late Edward Said, professor, writer and pro-Palestinian activist, and the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan, who was also a pro-Palestinian activist) grew up with American passports, though she was born in Jerusalem in 1940 and grew up in Cairo.
"Until 1948, and the Palestine war, our family moved regularly between Jerusalem and Cairo. For Palestinians, the year 1948 was a time of movement, of scattering, of families breaking up and moving apart. It was a time of breakdown, of entropy." Though a child and sheltered somewhat from outside events, she recalls the upheaval in their Cairo home as a stream of relations - distraught refugees - moved through.
"In 1948 the heart of our family was torn out, and the centre of our existence was broken....It is only recently that I have come to understand how deeply affected we have all been by the Palestinian experience, how we have lived our lives in its shadow. Most of all, though we have lived well and done well and accomplished much, though we have made many deep friendships throughout the world, since 1948 we have been outsiders - not only my parents, but their children, and, I fear, their children's children as well."
Makdisi does not dwell on "the Palestinian experience" in this book, which is as much biography and history as it is memoir, but its long shadow is always visible.
As she moves backwards and forwards in time, she describes an arc - a move towards an ideal of "modernity," synonymous with westernization, that carried her grandmother and mother farther from the extended family that gave women support and strength into an isolated role in the nuclear family.
This movement began with the values her grandmother absorbed in the mission schools and culminated in her own marooned existence in an affluent Washington DC suburb, frustrated, bored and conflicted between her role as perfect mother and housewife and her ambitions to be something in the world.
A century-long embrace of Western culture is clearly to blame in her mind, though Makdisi certainly does not advocate a repudiation of all things Western. Instead she concludes her book with a call for a new synthesis of priorities, which combines the "sustenance" of home and family with a connection to the outside world. Well, sure. In the best of all worlds, anyway.
Makdisi grew up thinking her grandmother led a sheltered, isolated, domestic existence, comfortable but limited. But as she researches this book - getting her own mother and uncles to write memoirs and delving into the history of the time, a more rounded and nuanced picture emerges of a woman who endured war and tragedy, love and loss, who worked to build her husband's congregation and who, during WWI and again after her husband's death, struggled alone to keep her family together with little financial support.
Makdisi's mother, Hilda, continued the move away from Arab customs, filling her house with European furniture, dressing in the latest Western fashions, adopting Western tableware and eating habits. No one seemed to regard any of this as a rejection of Arab culture at the time - it seemed more a matter of fashion and sophistication.
Only in retrospect does Makdisi see how it isolated her mother and grandmother from other women and robbed them of matriarchal status later in life. Yet her grandmother was miserable living with her mother-in-law and the matriarchal status seemed to work best when the financial power rested with the matriarchal generation.
Makdisi makes a number of generalizations that readers may quibble with. While I don't know the joy and comfort of the extended family (and it certainly does not appeal) I do know you cannot extrapolate middle class American life from the homogenous confines of an affluent D.C. subdivision. Miserable in her isolation there as a newlywed (as I too would be) I wondered why she didn't move into town, which they could easily have afforded.
The book touches on a century of culture and upheaval - the European occupation and recarving of boundaries after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, various ensuing rebellions, the rise of Zionism in a land where Jews had always lived and the belated reaction of alarm, the bitter legacy of exile and rootlessness following the 1948 war.
She does not explore any of these events in a deep political way but rather notes how each specifically affected her family. Perhaps this is why she does not touch on certain issues, such as the practicality of co-existing Israeli and Palestinian states and the repeated Palestinian rejection of partition.
This is a book filled with rich history, cultural detail and colorful anecdotes, all of which help illuminate a place and people that seem to grow more remote and frightening with every passing day. Makdisi is a fluent and visual writer, with a foot in two cultures and her book should be read by anyone with an interest in the Arab world.
--Portsmouth Herald
Problematic memoir
The wife of Edward Said grew up, like her brother, among the richest of the Arab elite, the Bourguise that had come up with the Arab Awakening following the Arab revolt in 1917.This was a class of wealthy, European educated, mostly Arab Christians who became not only nationalists but highly knowledgable about the world.Because of their connections and the fact that they were inter-related with Arabs across the middle east they were very worldy.
The Said family were two generatiosn removed from Baptist Arab converts in Lebanon who had immigrated to Palestine and then on to Egypt.They had summer homes both in Jerusalem and Lebanon.Theirs was a life of luxory and western ways, western dress, western values and eventually western self hate.
THis memoir covers the period 1940-2000. We are given insights into life after the flight from Palestine in 1948, life in Beirut during the war and insights into the arab world.Despite being a 'housewife' Mrs. Said is not really immigrating to Lebanon when she marries a Lebanese instead she is merely returning to her homeland.This is where the memoir is problematic.It covers up the very unique status of the Said family trying instead to put them in a larger arab morass which they do not exist in.There is little difference in the upbringing, wealth and outlook of the Saids and their western counterparts in the richest sections of London or New York.This is not an account of Arab women because 99.99% of Arab women do not live like this jetting between capitals and conversing in multiple languages.
Despite attempts at portraying her family as refugees one has only to compare the memoir with the truth of the many homes of the family to see a more complete picture.If this memoir is interesting it is interesting because the female protaganist did nothing for women's rights and gives us a journalistic account of life in the Arab world, a biased account of course covring up PLO atrocities, during the period.
Seth J. Frantzman
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