Summary
Sa’id Salih al-Asadi (1918–1997), Sha’b fighter in Abu Is’af’s unit in 1936 and 1948, who lived the rest of his life in Ayn al-Hilwa camp yet returned to Galilee dozens of times from 1948 to 1956, meeting his wife in a cave near Dayr al-Asad, in Manna’s account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.169-170).
Details
- Manna presents his story as memorialized — as fiction — in Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun, where he is “Abu Saleh,” called Yunis, and his wife is called “Naheeleh”; the novel’s cave is the cave near Dayr al-Asad Khoury named the “Gate of the Sun,” where Sa’id Salih in fact met his wife, who continued living with her children next to his elderly parents (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.169-170).
- Sa’id Salih died in al-Hamshari Hospital in Sidon, in a coma from which he never awakened, on 28 January 1997 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.169).