Out of Place: A Memoir (24 page)

So beginning in America I resolved to live as if I were a simple, transparent soul and not to speak about my family or origins except as required, and then very sparingly. To become, in other words, like the others, as anonymous as possible. The split between “Edward” (or, as I was soon to become, “Said”), my public, outer self, and the loose, irresponsible fantasy-ridden churning metamorphoses of my private, inner life was very marked. Later the eruptions from my inner self grew not only more frequent but also less possible to control.

The rest of the time in Maranacook was quite routine, as I had stopped deriving any pleasure from the place, and none at all from my fellow-campers. Murray hardly spoke to me again, nor I to him. One later experience emblematized the peculiarity of a camp summer that had lost its pleasure or point for me and had become either empty or onerous. There was an overnight canoe trip laid on for my age group that involved portage from one lake to another in the blank Maine forests, as well as long trajectories when we rowed across vast blazing hot tracts of brown-water lakes. My canoe was manned by me in the stern and another camper in the bow. Comfortably stretched out in the space between us was a counselor, Andy, with a long Czech name, who in his shiny red bathing suit, moccasins, and smoking pipe sat for hours reading a book whose title and contents I could not decipher. The odd thing was that after quickly going down a page with his left index finger he would methodically detach the page from the book, roll it up into a ball, and toss it casually into the lake. For one moment I looked
back at the line of bobbing paper casualties of Andy’s destructive reading habit, wondering what it all could mean. Discovering no sensible or at least plausible answer (except that he did not want anyone to read the book after him), I put it down to an aspect of American life that was inscrutable. In any event I remember reflecting afterward that the experience took its significance from the desire to leave no traces, to live without history or the possibility of return. Twenty-two years later I drove to where the camp I thought had once been: all that was left of any habitation were the deserted cabins, which had become a motel, then a retirement colony of some sort, then nothing, as the elderly Down East caretaker told me. He had never heard of Camp Maranacook.

We spent the last half of August and the first two weeks of September in New York. During the time my father was in the Harkness Pavilion at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, my mother and I were in a nearby rented bed and breakfast establishment. My two sisters were quartered with my uncle Al’s widow, Emily, and her three children, Abe (Abie), Charlie, and Dorothy, all of them several years older than I, all of them commuters from Queens to various jobs in Manhattan, Abie at a bank, Charlie at Foster’s Forty-second Street pen shop, and Dorothy at the Donnelley Company (phone-book printers) in the Wall Street area. My father’s kidney operation was what our entire U.S. trip was built around, though it was not until the evening before it took place that the risk of what was being embarked upon began terrifyingly to dawn on me. This was the second crisis in his health during my early life, yet it was the first time I sensed the likelihood of his death and a life without him. The third crisis thirteen years later was by far the worst, but this one in 1948 disoriented me greatly, filled me with apprehension and vicarious pain, gripped me with its potential for future despair and loneliness.

My parents had invited Fouad Sabra, then a gifted young Lebanese resident specializing in neurology at Columbia-Presbyterian, to dinner at the Cedars of Lebanon Restaurant on Twenty-ninth Street. It was two nights before the operation, so after dinner Fouad had arranged for my parents to meet a fellow resident, an Australian called Fred, as I remember, who was working in urology under the celebrated John Latimer, who was to perform the surgery. With the zeal of the fledgling
expert, Fred took it upon himself to lay before us all the things that could go wrong—infections, heart complications, blood deficiencies, the lot. This had a terrifying effect on my father, who, true to his character, saw the coming ordeal as something to be very worried about but necessary, whereas my mother and I believed it to be something to be avoided or postponed at all costs. Poor Fouad tried desperately to turn his friend off, or at least to temper and deflect the man’s unstoppable wish to make an impression, but to no avail. For years later, after Fouad came back to Lebanon, married Ellen Badr, my mother’s young cousin, and himself became an important professor and neurological expert at the American University of Beirut, the evening with Fred became a proverbial instance of what not to do just before an operation, an incident referred to by my father and Fouad together with uproarious laughter and insouciant banter.

Yet the operation was a success. There was only a cyst and no tumor in the kidney, but the whole organ had to come out leaving an enormous wound running back to front across my father’s midsection. For the two weeks he was at the Harkness Pavilion, my mother hired a little English male nurse; I would accompany him and my father on their wheelchair walks. Otherwise I was reduced to silent observation, spending long hours in an adjoining waiting room as my mother sat next to my father’s bed. What had briefly been for me a dramatic approach to something really serious was deferred and, like the fall of Palestine, transmuted into the new postoperative circumstances of great attention paid to my father’s health and healing, then within a short time absorbed in the rhythms of our lives. I soon became a marginal spectator to the nurse and my father, walking alongside the wheelchair while the two of them chatted monosyllabically; then later when we moved for a month into a suite at the luxurious Essex House for Wadie’s “recuperation” (a new word for me: my father seemed to me to say it with considerable relish) and he began to receive his Monroe, Royal Typewriter, and Sheaffer Pen visitors, insisting that I should be “there,” even though I had nothing to contribute to his meetings, I found myself to be daydreaming and distracted, with little that was interesting or profitable to do.

A solicitous doorman warned us against strolling in Central Park, so when I could escape parental requirements, I took refuge on the orderly
and yet (after Maranacook) lively New York streets, among the pedestrians, the enormous proliferation of shops everywhere, the theaters and cinema marquees, the tiny newsreel theaters, the overwhelming number of new cars and buses, the remarkable hustle of subways, the steam pouring through manhole covers, the efficient and helpful policemen (in Cairo they were farm boys, my parents said, which explained why they didn’t know the names of the streets on which they were stationed). And New York’s tremendous scale, its toweringly silent, anonymous buildings reduced one to an inconsequential atom, making me question what I was to all this, my totally unimportant existence giving me an eerie but momentary sense of liberation for the first time in my life.

Allusively, almost imperceptibly, Palestine would appear and then quickly disappear in our New York lives. I first heard about President Truman’s support for Zionism that summer, as my father rifled through the newspapers early one morning in the Essex House. From then on Truman’s name took on an evil talismanic force, which I still feel today, since I, like every Palestinian for the last three generations, blames him for his crucial part in handing Palestine over to the Zionists. Within an hour after we had returned to Cairo, one of my older refugee relatives told me with a hint of accusation trembling in his voice, “How do you like that Torman of yours? How can you stand him? He destroyed us!” (In Arabic,
tor
is the word for “bull,” used to derogate a person as both obdurate and malign.) One of my uncles recounted to me that teenagers at the Rockefeller Center collected money under signs that proclaimed: “Give a dollar and kill an Arab.” He had never been to New York, but wanted me to confirm the story, which I couldn’t.

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.