My Grandmother and Other Stories: Histories of the Palestinians as ...

On that ‘very typical’ evening, a young man from Abu Dis entered the house. He was
accustomed to visiting the family from time to time, and this visit, like all others,
was not on any special occasion. My in-laws always had guests, for the entire family
was involved in politics. The family was known for being socially liberal, meaning
that one could visit without prior arrangement or even without reason other than to
socialize, check up on each other, or learn the latest political developments.
Abu Mahmoud, however, was not a typical guest. He was an outstanding storyteller.
He loved to enter into fibbing competitions–none of the joking fibbers in Abu Dis
could beat him. Whenever he had new tales in the pipeline and heard that I was in
Abu Dis, he would come straight over to relate stories so full of oddities, lies, and
exaggerations that we sobbed with laughter. And whenever I went to Abu Dis, I
always anticipated his visits with excitement.
On that night, after we were satiated with laughter, he prepared to leave, having to work
early the next day. Before closing the door behind him, however, he turned and asked,
“Do you know an old sheikh in the mental hospital of Deir Yassin” (the Palestinian
village that was renamed Givat Shaul after 1948) called Sheikh al-Labadi?” I didn’t pay
attention to the question and I didn’t think anyone else had noticed. But my mother-inlaw
jumped out of her seat and asked Abu Mahmoud, “How old is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s surely past 80, but his health is remarkable,” Abu Mahmoud
responded. “He prays constantly. He is light-complexioned and small framed. He is
tiny, but charming, exactly like an angel.”
My mother-in-law’s eyes grew wide and she mumbled a few unintelligible words.
I asked what she had said, and she mumbled again. She is a woman who speaks
seldom, having spent her youth raising her children after her husband left her a young
widow. She rarely expresses her point of view, and we usually discern her interjections
through the smoke of her cigarettes she lights up day and night. I had just raised my
eyebrows at this unusual when she said more clearly, “My brother-in-law. He might be
my brother-in-law.”
Like the rest of those present, I understood nothing. After posing dozens of questions,
however, my mother-in-law told the story of Sheikh Hassan, as it was known up
until 1948. But no one believed that a relationship existed between that al-Labadi
ensconced in the Deir Yassin mental hospital, and Sheikh Hassan, my wife’s uncle.
Haifa’ did not know anything about the sheikh, other than that he was the father of
her cousin, Ghazi. (Ghazi had become like a father to her following her own father’s
death in 1967. It was he who escorted my wife to me on our wedding day.) Neither my
wife nor my mother-in-law nor any of the children remembered this sheikh who was
to enter our lives. I discovered that they knew little of this resistance fighter, other than
that he had been imprisoned and died.
Jerusalem Quarterly 30 [ 13 ]