In 2000, looking to expand the bookstore into a larger space, the Munas purchased a second storefront across Salah Eddin Street. Their timing was terrible. The Second Intifada erupted just before they planned to open, and the violence kept customers away from Jerusalem altogether. The building remained vacant until the Intifada eased in 2009. Only then did the Munas move their English books into the new space and add a café. They also expanded their selection to include books on topics beyond local politics. They added titles about Palestinian and Arab culture, tour guides to the region, popular magazines, and translations of Arabic novels and poetry. Educational Bookshop is now a destination for visitors to the city—especially those who lean left politically. Even liberal-minded Israelis occasionally drop by.
Mahmoud continues to sell Arabic titles in the original shop across the street, and sales are rising. Palestinians still avoid political books—the post-Oslo hangover continues—but they read poetry, short stories, and the occasional novel, particularly those by well-known North African authors. More young people are buying books, “especially if they are cheap,” Mahmoud said. No title, though, ever competes with the year-end horoscopes. “They are the bestsellers every year.”
Mahmoud knows his bookstore represents a rare success story in occupied Palestine. “The occupation did not stop me from starting a business, running a business, and opening every day,” he said. The store sells books that are highly contentious and critical of the Israeli government, but the authorities have not interfered. At worst, and only rarely, airport officials will search his book shipments, and a particular cover might draw attention. He remembers how a book about Hamas that featured an AK-47 on the cover furrowed the brows of airport security personnel. “They are worried that this is Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul,” Mahmoud said. But even books deemed suspicious are merely delayed. “The books are referred to a superior officer who may have already gone home, so they hold the whole shipment for a couple more days, during which time I must pay for their storage at the airport.” Eventually, someone in charge signs off on the shipment.
The biggest threat to the book business in Palestine comes from copyright infringement by Palestinian printers. Arabic books are regularly pirated in Palestine. As soon as a book becomes popular, cheap forgeries appear. Mahmoud would rather not stock pirated books in his shop, but due to Israeli import rules, he often has no other choice. Lebanon remains one of the top producers of Arabic books, but the country—along with Syria and Iran—is a declared enemy of Israel, so the authorities forbid their import. The Israelis automatically classify books from these nations as propaganda. Pirates, though, will surreptitiously bring in a single copy of a Lebanese book, block out the words “printed in Lebanon,” and make copies that can be “legally” sold.
Mahmoud sighed when I asked him if there was such thing as a Palestinian literature. “It is a puzzling question. There are definitely more Palestinians writing from outside Palestine than from inside Palestine, both in English and Arabic.” This diaspora creates most of the writing about Palestine that Mahmoud deems “important”—whether politics, history, or literature. Only those living away from Palestine, like Darwish and Said, possess both the luxury and the time to articulate the struggle. “The rest of us are just busy struggling.”
Mahmoud wonders what Palestinian literature would look like were it not for this struggle. “Most Palestinian literature has to do with Palestine, to do with the conflict, to do with refugees,” he said. “What would it be if Palestine was not occupied? Would writers have the motivation? Would we have Darwish? Would he have gone as far as he’s gone? What would we have talked about?” But Mahmoud believes this attachment to the same old narratives does not serve Palestinians or their literature well. “Why are we so stuck in the corner?” he asked. “Why are we not leaving? We are just rewriting, reconsuming, recomposing the occupation. Truly, we deserve more.”
Sometime during the first few days of May 1948, a carload of young Jewish men drove into the Talbieh neighborhood in West Jerusalem. They had guns and loudspeakers, and Anahid Melikian remembers them warning the residents of the mainly Christian neighborhood to “Get out. Get out or else.” Anahid’s family was living in the house her grandfather built after escaping the Armenian genocide more than thirty years earlier. For familiar reasons, the men with guns worried them. The British Mandate for Palestine wasn’t due to give way to the newly established state of Israel until midnight of May 14, but most of the British troops had already left, and Anahid’s family feared no one would protect them from the shouting armed men. The family fled their house in Talbieh and moved into the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City.
Anahid was in her early twenties and working in Haifa at the time, but when she heard of her parents’ evacuation she traveled to Jerusalem and stayed with them for a few weeks. She and her mother returned to the Talbieh house a couple of times to gather personal items they had left behind. “We took the stuff that had been in the family for a long time,” Anahid said. “The things we could carry.” They gathered up their carpets and good china. A cherished tea set. “And we took most of the books.”
But Anahid’s favorite books, twenty volumes of a German encyclopedia called Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, were too heavy to carry away. The encyclopedia was already an antique in 1948, but Anahid remembers how she used to thumb through the pages when she was a girl. “I used to look things up,” she said. “It had some beautiful illustrations. And they were the old kind, a two-page fold-out picture always between a piece of thin paper.” The books belonged to her father, Hagop Melikian, who was orphaned by the Armenian genocide and moved to Jerusalem in the care of German missionaries. The missionaries educated Hagop in German schools, and many of the books in the family library were written in German. He intended to pass them on to Anahid, who studied the language as a child. “The books were what my father bequeathed to me,” she said.
Anahid’s parents didn’t think much of leaving the books behind. Like Darwish and Abu Ahmed in al-Birwa, they believed their exile would be temporary. “We thought that this was going to last a few days,” Anahid said. Weeks later, though, the soldiers stopped letting anyone leave the Old City at all. Then they briefly shelled the city itself. Anahid and her family hid in a basement near the church until the bombing stopped. “I don’t think they meant to kill anyone,” Anahid said. “They meant to say to us: ‘Just so you understand, it is all over for you.’ And it was all over. That was it.”
Her father refused to dwell on all the family had lost. Each time Anahid’s mother lamented some missing possessions—her linens or silverware, for example—Hagop interrupted her. “We are not talking anymore about anything we left behind,” he said. “We are starting a new life now.” That new life would eventually lead the family to Winnipeg, where I met Anahid in 2013 at the home of her niece and namesake, Anahid Melikian Helewa, who joined us in her sunroom.
Sometime in the early 1970s, after studying in the United States and finding a teaching job in Beirut, Anahid returned to Talbieh. Just like Kanafani’s characters in Returning to Haifa, she wanted to see her former home, but the Israelis living in the house would not allow her to enter. “My grandmother had planted a jasmine in front of the house,” she told me, “and the jasmine was in bloom. I walked up the steps on the outside, and I picked a few of the jasmine blossoms. Then we walked back.”
Anahid would never see her father’s library again. The loss of these books was “a sort of heartbreak,” she said. She had long heard rumors that Israelis confiscated books from abandoned homes in West Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods in the days following the Nakba. This was different than the indiscriminate looting of Palestinian homes and villages that occurred elsewhere at the time. The book collection was systematic. “I was told that trucks would go with librarians,” Anahid said. “Soldiers would go and open the house, and the librarians would pick and choose the valuable books.”
In 2010, an I
sraeli scholar named Gish Amit researched the collection of Palestinian books as part of his doctoral thesis and confirmed the stories Anahid had heard. A few weeks after the majority of West Jerusalem’s non-Jewish population fled their communities, an official at the Hebrew University sent a memorandum to the provisional Jewish government under the laborious heading “Regarding the Urgent Need for a Central Authority Which Would Have Custodianship Over Abandoned Public and Private Libraries and Books.” The university wanted the government to grant the National Library the responsibility of collecting and caring for books the Palestinians left behind. “The National Library has the means to keep the books in the proper conditions,” the memorandum stated, “as well as to return them to their lawful owners, should such owners appear.” The new government agreed, and it charged the military to assist in the collection. The operation gave rise to what Amit called “a sort of spontaneous intelligence service” in which bookish soldiers and civilians reported the libraries and the book collections, small or large, they knew about. In the end, nearly thirty thousand books were collected from abandoned homes in Jerusalem. Just like the Khalidi library nearly two decades later, the books fell under the authority of the Custodian of Absentee Property.
The custodian office indexed the books and stored them in a special section of the National Library of Israel. Documents from the time suggested the books would eventually be returned to their owners; their storage at the National Library was considered an act of preservation and safekeeping. Subsequent documents, however, showed the Israeli library hoped to keep the “lion’s share” of the books—certainly all the most valuable titles. Nearly six thousand of these books, all marked AP, still occupy the shelves in a special room at the National Library and remain under the authority of the Custodian of Absentee Properties. None have been returned.
The National Library published a report in 1949 that listed sixty Palestinians whose books had been collected up until that point and the neighborhoods they’d lived in. The men on the list were scholars, writers, successful businessmen, and community leaders from influential Palestinian families. “The list constitutes a group portrait of a Palestinian elite already destroyed,” Amit wrote. “When the war ended it became evident that in addition to their homeland, homes, and property, the Palestinian people had also lost their aristocracy.” The list included author and translator Khalil Baydas, the cousin of Edward Said’s father and a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem. A lawyer who represented the Arab League in talks with the United Nations was also on the list. So, too, was Khalil al-Sakakini, the educator and writer who opened the cultural center in Ramallah that bears his name. Al-Sakakini wrote about his lost books in his journals:
Goodbye, my books! Farewell to the house of wisdom, the temple of philosophy, the scientific institute, the literary academy!
How much midnight oil did I burn with you, reading and writing, in the silence of the night while the people slept—farewell, my books!
I do not know what became of you after we left: were you looted? Burned? Were you transferred, with due respect, to a public or private library? Did you find your way to the grocer, your pages wrapping onions?
Anahid’s father was also on the list, but she had no idea until 2012, when an Israeli filmmaker named Benny Brunner produced a documentary called The Great Book Robbery, based in part on Amit’s research. Anahid’s niece saw the film online and was startled to see “Hagop Melikian from Talbieh” mentioned in the documentary. “I was happy and surprised to see my grandfather’s name,” the younger Anahid said. Hagop had passed away in 1967, and seeing his name in the film sparked memories of him. “He is alive now,” she told me. “His books are being talked about. I felt proud that his books are of value.” She called the Israeli embassy in Ottawa to inquire about her grandfather’s books. They said they didn’t deal with such matters and suggested she contact the National Library of Israel. She tried, but they didn’t respond to her requests. “So I left it at that,” she said.
For the senior Anahid, her father’s lost volumes stand as witnesses to a sophisticated culture that was lost after 1948. “You hear Israelis talk about Palestinians in a derogatory way,” she said. “They want you to think that the Palestinians are poor wretches living in refugee camps. I say, ‘Look at what was left behind in these houses. Look at the books.’ Maybe they will say that those Palestinians were not illiterate after all.” Anahid does not want the books back. Too much time has passed. “I just hope the books found a good home,” she said. “I hope somebody appreciates them.”
I traveled to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where the National Library of Israel is located, to learn more about the AP books and search for Anahid’s father’s encyclopedia. I wanted to hold those books in my hand, perhaps photograph them, just to let Anahid know they still exist and are being cared for.
I first sat with Raquel Ukeles, the curator of the library’s Islam and Middle East collection. Ukeles remains conflicted by the story of the AP books. “It was morally complicated,” she said, “because, really, the authorities saved that material.” Many books were destroyed during the violence and looting in the spring of 1948. The collection of books in Jerusalem can be seen as both a theft and a rescue. “There are stories I’ve heard from professors and academics in places like Haifa, where they saw rare Islamic manuscripts thrown on the sidewalks,” she said. “At the end of the day, I think about what I would have done had I been there. I would have probably taken those books and saved them also. As I understand it, there was crazy looting going on all over the place, and anything that wasn’t taken up disappeared.”
What Ukeles finds unforgivable, however, is that library personnel eventually removed the family names of the original Palestinian owners and branded the books with the general AP label. After learning this from Amit’s work, Ukeles “walked around for a few years thinking that of all the things the library did really wrong, that was the worst. How terrible to erase the names.”
Unless, of course, this never happened. Recently, a senior librarian who worked at the library for more than fifty years claimed the accusation is nonsense. “And he is radical left,” Ukeles said, “so not an apologist at all.” The man showed Ukeles examples of academic articles written in 1950 mentioning Palestinian manuscripts already labeled AP, years before Amit claims the original family names were removed.
“So you’re saying the library didn’t erase the names but never recorded them in the first place,” I said.
She nodded. “I am sorry they didn’t do that, but at least they didn’t consciously destroy the records.”
I wasn’t sure what to believe. In Gish Amit’s research, library personnel from the 1950s and 1960s describe in detail sorting and cataloguing large flour sacks full of books according to their original owners. “Every book had a sequential number,” one man said, “and beneath it we wrote an abbreviation of the owner’s name in English. For example, the letters SAK stood for Sakakini, NIMR meant Nimer, and so on. Those letters appeared both on the inside cover and on the index card.” As for the removal of these records, however, Amit is less precise. He states only that the owners’ names were erased before the 1960s and admits he does not know how the decision to remove the owners’ names was made. In his paper “Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s ‘Collection’ of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem,” Amit writes:
The fact that the books in the 1950s were catalogued to the extent possible by their Palestinian owners’ names could indicate Israeli willingness in the early years to pay compensation for the abandoned property. Whatever the case, from the 1960s onward the direct personal connection was severed, eliminating not only any possibility of the books’ return but also the unique and nonduplicable memory of human beings, preserved in the library for over a decade and now lost in a general archive.
Amit suggests that, by the 1960s, the Israeli government had changed its mind about what to do with absentee property. The fate of the Palestinian b
ooks mirrors that of deserted Palestinian villages at the same time, he notes. The Israel Land Administration bulldozed over a hundred such villages in 1965 “to ‘clean up’ the country and permanently prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes,” Amit writes. “The purpose of both erasures, deliberate and premeditated, was to render the outcome of the war a final, irreversible reality.”
Whether records of the original owners were erased or never compiled at all, both Ukeles and Amit acknowledge that, at the very least, the books were kept separate and distinct. The library could have easily swallowed the material into the general collection. Instead, they labeled the books “Palestinian” and dedicated a special room for them. “Thus these books constitute a strange monument that binds together destruction and conservation, demolition and salvage,” Amit writes.
I wondered if the fact that the library stored the AP titles apart from the general collection signaled an enduring intention on the part of the government to one day return the books. Ukeles didn’t know. “I’ve never talked to a government official about this,” she said. Such a decision would be problematic, since returning the books might set a difficult precedent for the Israeli government regarding absentee property in general. If the Israelis give books back to their original owners, pressure would certainly mount to also return, say, Anahid’s home in Talbieh or Abu Ahmed’s family land in al-Birwa.
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