Summary
Mother of Leila in Three Mothers, Three Daughters (the name is altered, as are all names in the book), a widow in Abu Ghosh who grew up in Jerusalem as a British policeman’s daughter, married her cousin there at fourteen, and stayed in the village through the 1948 war while most of its people fled, raising her children as an Israeli citizen who calls herself, as her daughter reports it, “a Palestinian with an Israeli identity card—a Palestinian Israeli” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1234, 1330).
Details
- Umm Khaled (Amina) is seventy-two in the authors’ framing, a thin woman in somewhat frail health with asthma, living with the youngest of her daughters in a hilltop house in Abu Ghosh, visited frequently by her children and “hundred or so” grandchildren; she was interviewed by Rafiqa Othman alone from December 1994 and would not be comfortable with “a man from the outside” in her home now that her husband is dead (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 1234-1240).
- She explains Abu Ghosh’s survival in 1948, alone among the area’s Arab villages, by God’s blessing, in legends she heard from her grandmother, mother, aunts and mother-in-law: the holy man who slept forty years and woke to Qaryat al-Enab, the Caucasus sheikh Abu Ghosh named for his booming voice, and Wafa, whose mother’s prayer when the sky opened on leilat al-qadr won the best of life for her daughter; Wafa’s four sons by Issa, Abu Ghosh’s hidden son, are the ancestors of the village’s four clans (lines 1242-1250).
- Born in Abu Ghosh, third of ten children, she grew up in Harat al-Sadiya in Jerusalem’s Old City, where her father, who got his job with the English as a policeman just after her birth and credited her with the luck, earned five pounds a month; her brothers were schooled at his full expense while she was taken out of school after one year and given a sewing machine, and can today read two words (lines 1252-1254).
- From about eight she was trusted with part of her father’s salary for the suq shopping — a grocer told him, “This daughter of yours is worth ten sons!” — and once pressed his uniform trousers under her mattress the night before an inspection, for which he told her, “My daughter, you have whitened my face!” (lines 1256-1258)
- Her uncle decided she would marry her cousin, her aunt Khadija’s son, who had wanted a stranger and whose mother wanted a different stranger; she was thirteen at the request (lines 1266-1268).
- Her two older brothers died one after the other — Muhammad, eighteen, of typhoid eighteen days after starting as a policeman, and Amir, shot through the chest when his baruda misfired — and a year and a half of mourning in the clan postponed her wedding, which was finally held without a party or zaffa, in a black dress and dark clothes, with her mahr twice the usual amount (lines 1270-1272).
- In Abu Ghosh she lived in her aunt and mother-in-law’s house; her husband, orphaned at seven, had worked the monastery’s fields since boyhood and read the Koran on his way to and from work; in public the couple never exchanged a word, as custom was, and until maybe twenty-five years before the interviews she wore a mandil over her face outside the house (lines 1278-1282).
- Her first child, Khawla, was born when she was sixteen, a daughter she insisted to the English hospital’s nurse was a son; after Khaled she brought Issa, Ibrahim and Muhsen in a row; a doctor had warned her to space pregnancies four years apart, against which her mother-in-law threatened that her only son would take another wife — “Al-durra murra [the second wife is bitter]” is Umm Khaled’s comment (lines 1284-1290).
- Muhsen was born in 1948 in the house, alone, with a sheet twined as a rope to the iron bedpost, and the cord uncut for a half-hour, while the family sheltered in the monastery; she had refused her husband’s 100 pounds from the sold cow and stayed: “If you die, I’ll die with you. If you live, I’ll live.” (lines 1292-1296)
- The 100 pounds, hidden behind the closet mirror, was gone after the soldiers’ first search of the house, and she and her husband each believed the other lying until a later raid in which the soldier Moshe went straight to the mirror (lines 1300-1302).
- Ninety dunams in her husband’s name at Emwas were taken in 1948 and never returned, though the family still keeps the papers proving them theirs; their three village dunams were not taken (line 1306).
- After her tenth child she received a congratulatory paper from Ben-Gurion’s government and a check for 100 pounds; she never hung the paper (line 1446).
- She gives twenty-one pregnancies, four miscarriages, a son Khaled dead at eighteen, a first daughter Maysa dead at a few months, and fifteen children left (lines 1444-1456); see Where sources disagree.
- About 1955 her husband was arrested over a bomb outside a Jewish school and, no real proof being brought against him and three others, was banned from the village for six months, serving four in Baqa al-Gharbiya; her appeal to the president of Israel’s wife, with a lawyer’s letter and all her children, brought no help, and she visited him twice by police permit (lines 1458-1462).
- She refused college for her daughters outright — “High school was good enough. I didn’t want them leaving the village to study.” — fearing rumours, and holds that fate, not arranging, decides whether a daughter gets a good husband: Majda’s cousin-husband drinks and sold her bracelets, while Leila’s cousin marriage, which she opposed, worked out well (lines 1467-1473).
- Her one search for a son’s bride, in East Jerusalem for Issa after the 1967 war, failed because too many village girls were his ikhweh fi al-ridaah and East Jerusalem parents refused a groom “in Israel”; Issa married in the village and has nine children (line 1475).
- In Abu Ghosh the 1967 war brought no shooting or bombing and no scratch to anyone, and the opening that followed — fathat al-dunya — brought months of West Bank guests, cheap shopping over there, and three daughters married to men from over there, among them Maysa, whose illness took her to sheikhas in Artas and Nablus without cure (lines 1481-1496).
- She is frankly against the Intifada and against killing on any side, holds the Hamas people wrong to oppose the sulha being attempted, and expects peace within one, five or fifteen years, God knows (lines 1498-1500).
- Abu Khaled died suddenly six years before the interviews, on the way to hospital; she keeps his picture, his diary, and his papers — half-eaten by mice — including the deed to the ninety dunams at Emwas (lines 1502-1506).
- She lives with her youngest daughter Suhad, twenty-seven and unmarried, whose ground-floor store keeps her from asking her brothers for anything; Abu Khaled had insisted she bear Suhad, at about forty-five (line 1508).
Where sources disagree
- The authors frame her as raising “her family of sixteen children” (line 1234); her own count in the same work gives twenty-one pregnancies, four miscarriages, two children dead, and fifteen left (lines 1444-1456).
- She dates her parents’ return from Jordan to 1965 (line 1310) and also says they did not return until just before the 1967 war (line 1442); in her fuller telling she again gives 1965, through the Red Cross, with her father dying about a year later (line 1479).
- Khaled is named, in one telling, after his father’s father (line 1288) and, in another, after his father (line 1452).
- Of Leila’s miscarriage after forty she says she and Walid told Leila it was haram to get rid of the baby and that Leila miscarried because she was upset, “at least, she didn’t go have something done” (line 1510); Leila’s own account is that she induced the miscarriage herself (lines 1406-1408). Both stand in Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories.
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Leila, Abu Ghosh, Rafiqa Othman, David Ben-Gurion, Emwas