Out of Place: A Memoir

As I returned to the United States a few years later and have lived there ever since, I feel a much sharper sense of dissociation about its relationship with Israel than my Palestinian contemporaries, who see it as a Zionist power pure and simple, but do not acknowledge any contradiction in the fact that they also send their children to college here, or do business with U.S. corporations. Until 1967 I succeeded in mentally dividing U.S. support for Israel from the fact of my being an American pursuing a career there and having Jewish friends and colleagues. The remoteness of the Palestine I grew up in, my family’s silence over its role, and then its long disappearance from our lives, my mother’s open discomfort with the subject and later aggressive dislike of both Palestine and politics, my lack of contact with Palestinians during the eleven years of my American education: all this allowed me to live my early American life at a great distance from the Palestine of remote memory, unresolved sorrow, and uncomprehending anger. I always disliked Truman, but this was balanced by my surprised admiration for Eisenhower’s resolute position against Israel in 1956. Eleanor Roosevelt revolted me in her avid support for the Jewish state; despite her much-vaunted, even advertised, humanity I could never forgive her for her inability to spare the tiniest bit of it for our refugees. The same was true later for Martin Luther King, whom I had genuinely admired but was also unable to fathom (or forgive) for the warmth of his passion for Israel’s victory during the 1967 war.

  I think it must have been the result of that 1948 trip that a sort of political landscape of the United States opened up in our Cairo lives, to which my parents made regular reference. Dorothy Thompson became an important writer for us, in part because she appeared in Cairo for some event attended by my parents, in part because my mother subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal and read her occasionally pro-Arab pieces there. I never read her but well remember the positive valence attached to her name. Also to Elmer Berger’s name and, a little later, Alfred Lilienthal’s—both were outspoken anti-Zionist Jews. But it was all distant and intermittent. Much more lively and immediate was my recollection of the Davega stores that dotted the Midtown area, where you could buy Van Heusen shirts and baseballs; or the grand halls of Best and Co. on Fifth Avenue, where my sisters and I had been outfitted for camp; or the various Schrafft’s coffee shops preferred by my mother for lunch or afternoon coffee.

  We returned to Egypt by the American Export Line’s one-class Excalibur, a smaller, less well appointed boat than the Saturnia. The staterooms seemed austere, barren, divided into upper and lower berths, without much light, and hardly any place to sit. No sooner had we left New York in late September than we were hit by a vicious tropical storm that confined my father, his wound scarcely healed, to his bunk, and my mother and sisters to theirs, with acute moaning and seasickness the common condition. I was virtually alone for about three and a half days; once again the pitching had no effect at all on my stomach or frame of mind, though being alone at such a time on a more rigorously run ship than the Saturnia meant that I was forbidden to leave the library or lounge for the howling decks, and was obliged to take my meals of sandwiches and milk in the bar alone with a sadly depressed-looking barman. The final days of our trip into Alexandria harbor were placidly uneventful, a period in which the United States seemed to drop away from us like a way station we had stopped at for a while before we resumed our main journey, which was in Cairo and, more and more, Lebanon.

  As a country lost, Palestine was rarely mentioned again except once, during my last year at CSAC, when, just after an animated debate about Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, I suddenly grasped what my friend Albert Coronel was referring to when he spoke contemptuously of “six against one.” The phrase jolted me, as it seemed to contradict what I implicitly believed: that Palestine was taken from us by Europeans who, coming with (as well as after) the British, were incomparably more powerful, organized, and modern than we. I was dumbfounded that to someone like Albert—a close friend of mine who, with his older sister Colette, had been with me for a while at GPS and was now at CSAC because his family (Jewish with Spanish passports) had sensed the post-1948 danger to the children in a hostile Arab environment—the fall of Palestine should seem like another anti-Jewish episode. I recall to this day the abrupt sense of mystified estrangement I felt from him, alongside the puzzled (and contradictory) feeling I shared with him at how unsporting and bullying those six were. I was suffering a dissociation myself about Palestine, which I was never able to resolve or fully grasp until quite recently, when I gave up trying. Even now the unreconciled duality I feel about the place, its intricate wrenching, tearing, sorrowful loss as exemplified in so many distorted lives, including mine, and its status as an admirable country for them (but of course not for us), always gives me pain and a discouraging sense of being solitary, undefended, open to the assaults of trivial things that seem important and threatening, against which I have no weapons.

  My last year at CSAC, 1948–49 as a ninth-grader, was sadly limited both academically and socially. I had about four classmates and only one main teacher, Miss Breeze, an elderly woman given to frightening tremors when upset. She taught us biology, math, English, and history, while French and Arabic were given by nondescript local teachers whose place in the curriculum resembled recreation time more than instruction. There was no tenth grade, so it was decided that the next year I should go to a school in which, as Miss Breeze put it in a letter to my parents, I would be “challenged.” This meant I had to sit the entrance exam to the English School in Heliopolis. The questions were uninteresting but nonetheless reminded me how much my knowledge of England’s pastures green lagged considerably behind the expected level: the years at CSAC weren’t too useful to this other environment. Better the rowdier, all-male precincts of Victoria College (which accepted me without much fuss) than what seemed to me the precious, inhospitable outpost of the English School. My foreignness and difference barred me from the privileged exclusivity of the English School, in contrast to my sisters who were shining examples of assiduous students, well-liked, with lots of friends who would often turn up at home for tea and birthday parties.

  I was more done than ever that last spring at CSAC, which seemed less and less like a real institution and more like a one-room school-house fussily run by the ubiquitous and erratic Miss Breeze. All of the older students—Stan Henry, Dutch von Schilling and his sister, Bob Simha, Margaret Osborn, Jeanne Badeau—had left, as had many of the teachers except for obviously overage and unhirable creatures like Blow, as we called her.

  At the same time, my moral and spiritual character was being attended to by weekly catechism classes at All Saints’ Cathedral on Sharia Maspero. The church itself was part of a grand compound facing the Nile a little to the north of the British Army’s Kasr el Nil barracks (now the site of the Nile Hilton). An impressive plaza with ceremonial driveway allowed cars entry to the cathedral’s main doors, the whole of the place communicating that sense of monumental power and absolute confidence which was so much the hallmark of the British presence in Egypt. On both sides of the cathedral stood annexes that housed offices and homes for the resident staff, which included a bishop, an archdeacon, and various padres, all of them British. All this completely disappeared in the late 1980s when a traffic flyover was constructed across the Nile.

  But it was especially from Padre Fedden, whom my parents represented to me as a saintly man much envied by the others, and from Bishop Allen, who was nominally in charge, that I learned to love (and have still managed to hold in my memory) both the Book of Common Prayer and the spirited parts of the Gospels, John in particular. Fedden seemed more approachable and human than the others, but I always felt the rift between white man and Arab as separating us in the end, maybe because he was in a position of authority and it was his language, not mine. I remember nothing of the weekly catechism classes in terms of what we discussed, none at all. But I do remember the earnestly sincere look on Fedden’s face when he intoned, “in the beginning was the Word,” for e
xample, or when he explained the Apostles’ Creed, “On the third day he rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,” or aspects of the Trinity. I still have my Book of Common Prayer from that time, even though I read it only as a way of regretting the pedestrianism of the New Standard Revised Edition, or whatever it is now called.

  My fellow catechist was an American university student eight or nine years my senior, a bespectacled Copt called Jimmy Beshai, whose interest in psychology had somehow delivered him to seek the embrace of the Anglican church. Occasionally he and Fedden would engage contentiously on points that Beshai thought could be made more “experiential” (a word I did not know then but that he patiently explained to me one day as we left the class) and less dependent on either faith or vision, Fedden always and in the end impatiently holding out for mystery, drama, inexplicability. I admired Fedden’s belief without completely accepting it, since the whole business seemed to be important because my family was set on this confirmation ritual, not because God had moved me.

  Bishop Allen’s rare appearances were somber and dispiriting. He had apparently been an Oxford don or religious figure of some estimable sort, and over time had risen in rank to become Archbishop Geoffrey Allen, head of the Egyptian, Sudanese, and one other I’ve missed here (perhaps Ethiopian), Diocese, a man of considerable power and administrative stature. He was always in at least some of his scarlet-robed uniforms whenever I saw him, communicating a sense of haughty distance, even indifference, together with a sense of powerful connections to the embassy and more worldly affairs. He had an intensely executive air totally at odds with Fedden’s enthusiasm for religious substance. When I saw the two of them together, it was clear that Allen regarded his junior deacon as barely to be taken notice of; when he examined us (“Let’s take a look at the meaning of the sacraments,” he might begin) his eyes flitted impatiently and curiously while he busied himself with his tea, though it was evident he had the religious material down pat and could reel off concrete facts and features about James I and Hooker that Fedden’s expostulations did not contain. All this took place in a country whose own astonishingly long and dense history, from the Pharaohs to King Farouk, was simply never mentioned.

  I was confirmed and took my first Communion on a Sunday in early July 1949 with my godmother, Aunt Nabiha, standing next to me in the imposing transept of the cathedral. Fedden was there but was relegated to a minor role, while Bishop Allen presided over the ceremony with almost Oriental opulence—candles, intoned prayers, crosses, crooks, antiphonal choruses, the organ and choir, procession, recession, and several orders of lesser clergy—all for me and Jimmy Beshai. Having been received in Communion with the company both of saints and ordinary participants, I found myself trying to feel different, but only experienced a feeling of incongruence. My hope that I might gain insight into the nature of things or a better apprehension of the Anglican God proved fanciful. The hot and cloudless Cairo sky, my aunt Nabiha’s disproportionately large hat perched on her small head and body, the placidly flowing Nile immediately in front of us in its undisturbed immensity as we stood on the cathedral esplanade: all these were as I was, exactly the same. I suppose I had been vaguely looking for something to lift me out of the strange limbo into which I had fallen, with CSAC ending and Victoria College about to begin in October, but confirmation was not it.

  I was now even more in a disconcerting orbit between my mother and my father (who seemed increasingly distant and demanding at the same time); Cairo in that period was full of reports of assassinations and disappearances, and as I neared my fifteenth birthday the following year, there was yet more apprehension in my mother’s voice as she warned me not to come home late, not to eat anything off the vendors’ carts, not to sit too close to people on the tram or bus—in short, to spend most of my time at home—whereas an awakened sexual hunger stimulated me to wilder and wilder dreams of what I wanted to do in Cairo. A kind of steady but receding motif in our lives was Aunt Nabiha’s Palestinian work. Despite the tension between her sons and her brother (my father), she still came for Friday lunch, and her interest in my catechism continued, as symbolized by the gold ring inscribed “ES,” which she presented to me on that hot and cloudless day after the service and which I still wear.

  VII

  BEGINNING IN 1943, THE SUMMER AFTER MY FATHER’S nervous breakdown, and for the next twenty-seven summers, we would spend most of July, August, and September in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir (which means “on the outskirts of Shweir”), a village my father loved and my mother claimed to hate, even though her mother’s family, the Badrs, came from there. Dhour was a summer resort whose houses and hotels were strung along a narrow ascending road that meandered along the backs of three small mountains in central Lebanon. Shweir itself was a little town, strung along a steeply descending road, going in the opposite direction, that began in Dhour’s only significant public space, the main square, or saha, dipped sharply to the left next to the Greek Orthodox church, and wound its way down to the valley, to its very heart, “Ayn al Qassis, the “priest’s spring.” A totally Christian village, Shweir produced the shopkeepers and functionaries who serviced Dhour during the season. As a child I had assumed they simply sat home during the long, dark, and snowy winter. Except for my mother’s extremely aged great-uncle Faris Badr, a rosy-faced, heavily mustachioed gentleman who always wore dark glasses and a black suit and tie with a red tarbush, carried a very ancient black umbrella, and was resident there all year, my mother’s Lebanese relatives lived and worked in Beirut, only visiting Dhour in the summer season.

  We spent our first summer of 1943 in Dhour’s only “grand” hotel, the Kassouf, which sat rather haughtily and pretentiously on a promontory near the end of the road leading due east for two miles out of the saha toward Bois de Boulogne, the next village; the Kassouf was clearly modeled after a château, its long sweeping staircase, balustrades, and massive stony assertiveness dominating the village and valley. I first learned about red wine and red vinegar in the Kassouf’s formal dining room, and I also caught my first glimpse of a roulette and baccarat room. The hotel seemed to be full of wealthy Syro-Lebanese tourists from Egypt (Shawam), people from our class, I suppose, for whom in comparison with Cairo’s oppressive summer heat, Dhour’s sunny and relatively dry warm days and cool, foggy afternoons and evenings were a bracing contrast. These people, like us, spent a good deal of time walking the Kassouf’s terraces, occasionally venturing onto the only road, which had no pavements and a steep fall on either side, at the risk of being run over by a speeding car or bus. There were no shops between the Kassouf and the saha, and the hotel was just far enough to make a casual stroll into town out of the question; so we stayed on the grounds with the other children, their nannies, and parents. My mother was pregnant that summer with Joyce and seemed to spend most of her time in the room, while my father—by now a confirmed bridge addict—stayed in one or another card room most of the morning, afternoon, and, at least three times a week, evening.

  Not until 1944 did I begin very tentatively to make out the broad lines of my parents’ plan for each summer, which began after school finished in the early spring. By late May I could sense the impending departure date without being told. New shorts and sandals would have to be purchased, there would be an agonizingly long and maddeningly finicky family photo session with a pair of elderly spinster sisters, both of whom were totally dumb and therefore limited in communication to excited grunts and agitated nods, in their extremely hot third-floor studio around the corner from Shepheard’s Hotel. Dr. Haddad would call to give us our round of typhoid shots, and one day all the living room and smaller salons’ furniture would suddenly be draped in pink, white, or pale-green sheets. Until 1948 we would gather, on the appointed day, in the lobby of 1 Sharia Aziz Osman for a caravan of two or (later, as our number increased) three cars to take us, one or two maids, and the cook, to Bab-el-Hadid Station, where we would board t
he wagon-lit bound for the Suez Canal towns of either Ismailia or al-Kantarah. From there we crossed into Sinai for the long overnight ride to Haifa, which we would reach at about noon the next day.

  The train journey was indescribably romantic and pleasurable. I loved the polished wood walls, the handsome seat I could pull down and sit on by the window, the blue shaded lamps coming on at twilight, the Greek waiters and vaguely French conductor, who sat at the end of the corridor along which our three or four compartments lay and, after dinner, came by to pull down the upper beds and do up the lower ones. I used to look forward to going to the resplendently gaudy dining car, with its table silver and beady lampshades tinkling as the train lurched from side to side, making the white-robed suffragis and the tuxedo-clad Italian or Armenian maître d’hôtel do the same. The menu always contained a rice first course, followed by a second course of lamblike meat with gravy, and finally a small bowl of oversweet crème caramel, all of them foods banned from my parents’ rigorously healthy table of spinach, carrots, celery, and peas enlivened only slightly by broiled chicken or grilled veal and the bland pastas that seemed so important to what we called my father’s “regime.” When I crawled into the fresh sheets of my tightly made up upper-deck bed I would switch on my special reading light and extricate my book from the odd little net strung up along the wall where I could store my possessions with a rare sense of privacy, safe from sudden parental invasion. Sleep would come very late and the desert dawn very early. The melancholy of the half-lit desert wastes brought with them an additional sense of calm, and in the scene’s monotony, and my utter solitude as everyone else slept, I was relieved of pressure and the continual anxiety of not getting anything right.

  In Haifa we would be met by two seven-seater taxis operated by the el-Alamein company, which took us either to Jerusalem for a week or, more frequently, along the northwest road out of Palestine via Acre to Naqura, the Lebanese border village, and from there a few more kilometers past Tyre to the fishing village of al-Sarafand. There we stopped at the waterside restaurant where it always seemed like hours before the fish was slowly grilled to my father’s satisfaction and duly eaten, and we were able to proceed north along deserted roads to Sidon. Bypassing Beirut we would take the Dhour–Bikfaya road, which with a sudden hoist took us up above Antelias and the dark-blue Mediterranean spread out in all its shimmering mystery beneath us.