Summary
Palestinian author, poet and scholar who built his house in Qatamon, Jerusalem, in the years before 1936, seeing it as a personal project and a national project, and who fled to Cairo in 1948; his journals and his daughter Hala’s memoir, read aloud on Zochrot’s West Jerusalem tour, carry the library-theft narrative in Chapter 4 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.139-144).
Details
- “Our house was a world in itself”, the tour guide read from Hala Sakakini’s edited volume of her father’s journals and her own published memoirs (PDF p.140).
- As Qatamon came under constant gunfire in 1948, he wrote sarcastically in his journals: “We have turned our neighborhood, which is encircled by a road and is a kind of island, into an entrenched fortress, compared to which the fortresses of Sebastopol, Verdun, Gibraltar and Malta are as nothing” (PDF p.141).
- His family was the last Palestinian family in Qatamon, fleeing to Cairo on April 30, 1948, after the San Simon battle; in the months after, he lamented the theft of his books: “Farewell, my library! Farewell, the house of wisdom, the abode of philosophers, a house and witness for literature!” and “goodbye, my books! I know not what has become of you after we left: Were you looted? Burnt? Have you been ceremonially transferred to a private or public library? Did you end up on the shelves of grocery stores with your pages used to wrap onions?” (PDF p.142).
- After 1967 his daughters Hala and Domiya heard rumors his books were housed at the Hebrew University National Library; a senior librarian told them, “You have no right to claim anything because each volume, individually, and all of them together, are abandoned property”, and brought them one book whose title they remembered — “We selected The Beggars, by Al-Jahdh, a ninth century encyclopedist”, as printed — letting them page through it “as if we were dangerous culture robbers” (PDF p.143-144).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Qatamon, Zochrot, Absentee Property Law, Hebrew University, Walid Khalidi