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The Disinherited
Volume 2 in the Palestine Trilogy
A novel by
Ibrahim Fawal
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by Ibrahim Fawal
Youssef Chahine
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2012 by Ibrahim Fawal. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-259-7
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-195-7
LCCN: 2012032514
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
To my grandchildren,
George, Matthew, Elizabeth, Nicholas,
Luke, Rose, Peter, Elie, Ella, Rania, Charles.
Contents
June 1947 was the eve of the end of the world for eighteen-year-old Yousif Safi, for Yousif is a Palestinian. Book One of this trilogy, entitled On the Hills of God, described the year-long journey of a boy becoming a man, while all that he has known crumbles to ashes. When we first encountered Yousif, he was filled with hopes for his education abroad to study law and with daydreams of his first love, the beautiful Salwa. As the future of Palestine looked increasingly bleak due to the pressure on the United Nations from the international Zionist movement, Yousif was compelled to think like a man. He was frustrated by his fellow Arabs’ inability to thwart the Zionist encroachment and by his own inability to prevent the impending marriage of Salwa to an older suitor chosen by her parents. As Palestinians faced the imminent establishment of Israel, on May 15, 1948, Yousif resolved to face his own responsibilities of manhood. Despite the monumental odds against him, Yousif won Salwa’s hand and his own happiness. But then the war came and his world was upended. He and his neighbors, friends, and family were forced from the homeland they had occupied for generations. They lost their homes, their possessions, and in some cases their honor and their lives. They became refugees on a desperate flight to sanctuary in Jordan. In the chaos, Yousif and Salwa were separated. In his heart, he knew she was alive, but how would he find her? As he and his mother adjusted to refugee life in Amman, Yousif vowed to win back both his loves—Salwa and Palestine—and create his world anew.
Salwa was on Yousif’s mind the moment he opened his eyes. As if having haunted him in a dream were not painful enough. As if having turned the dream into a recurring nightmare were an ordeal he could tolerate. There she was again slipping in and out and reasserting her presence in his life as if he needed a reminder of the agony of their forced separation. Wasn’t life in exile already hell?
Yousif and his mother left the three-bedroom apartment which they shared with Abu Mamdouh and his family to do some shopping. The bedlam in the narrow streets of Amman increased day after day. Masses crammed into the bottle-necked heart of the city. Veiled women, western-styled women, and Bedouin women with tattoos on their faces and rings in their noses mingled in the shops. Buicks and camels and donkeys vied for space. Trinket-selling pushcart peddlers jostled with pedestrians, shoeshine boys, beggars, and the lost. The jangle of traffic and the dour faces made an already coarse city more unsightly. Every shop, every cafe, every sidewalk was so crowded that within an hour both Yousif and his mother had lost interest in shopping. But pots and pans and mats and provisions were necessities. Beds were impossible to find and they didn’t even bother to look for them. With fewer than eighty pounds to their name—and shrinking rapidly—it was ludicrous for them even to think about such luxuries.
After helping his mother carry back to their apartment a skillet, a pot to boil eggs, a kilo of rice, a kilo of lentils, two packages of spaghetti, a bottle of olive oil, and half a pound of zaatar (all of which cost less than three pounds), Yousif returned to the business district, hoping to run into anyone who could tell of Salwa’s whereabouts. None could, nor could he tell them where to find their own loved ones. The marketplace seemed like a large football field full of searchers. People he had scarcely known in Ardallah embraced him. One tall, gaunt woman in ankle-length dress almost brought tears to his eyes. He remembered when he and his friends Amin and Isaac had been returning from bird hunting back in Ardallah and had run into her coming
