Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

The mother said, “Listen. I want to tell you a secret that your father and I thought would be better to hide from you because it would only create unnecessary problems for you. But things have changed, and you have to know.”

The father interrupted her, annoyed, saying there was no reason for such talk. He pushed his plate aside, put his head in his hands and bent over, listening.

“I’m not an Arab or a Muslim. I’m Jewish.”

Silence reigned.

Jamal said the food stuck in his gullet and he almost choked, but he didn’t dare cough or take a drink. Everything became constricted. Even the September air stopped moving.

Jamal looked at his brothers and sister and saw that they were all examining their plates as though they didn’t dare to raise their eyes.

After having dropped this bomb, the mother seemed relieved; the darkness left her face, she sat up straight, and her voice came back to her.

“Your father isn’t from Gaza but from Jerusalem, where he belonged to one of the city’s rich and notable families. There, in 1939, he met a German Jewess who’d recently migrated to Palestine with her family. Sarah Rimsky. In Jerusalem the girl experienced the difficulties that afflicted many German emigrants: She had a hard time acclimatizing to the laws of the Yeshuv , to its values and language. She was eighteen years old, studying German literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That year she met a man by chance and fell in love with him. She had gone into a shop to buy clothes, and there was a young man, wearing a red fez, working in his father’s shop. The relationship was difficult, if not impossible, at first. She loved him but didn’t dare declare her love, and he behaved as though he were indifferent. He would sit in front of his shop and wait for her, and when she went by, on her way to the university, he’d say good morning to her in English. She’d reply in German, and they’d laugh. Then things developed. He invited her for Arab pastries at Zalatimo’s; she went with him and adored, she said, the smell of orange-blossom water and rose water. They went walking in the streets of the Old City, discovering it together. He said she taught him to see Jerusalem, that he was seeing the city through her eyes. That was his first declaration of love. After a year of a relationship that came into being around the scent of orange-blossom water and the alleyways of the city, they decided to get married — and this was unthinkable. A Palestinian marry an immigrant German Jewess? Impossible, said everyone. But there was no going back.

The girl told her friend she was prepared to get married in secret and run away with him. She suggested Beirut. The young man asked her to be patient and entered into negotiations with his father, which lasted two years.

The girl waited, and the story got out.

One day, the young man arrived with his father’s consent, on condition that they leave Jerusalem and go and live in Gaza, where the father had bought his son land and a house.

The crisis ended with their marriage and move to Gaza, where they lived and managed a stretch of orange orchards. What’s remarkable is that the young woman adapted quickly to her new situation. She started speaking Arabic with a Gaza accent, embraced Islam and lived in Gaza as a Muslim Arab woman. The name Sarah was not as widespread among Muslims in those days as it is today, though it was not considered unacceptable.

The mother said she’d told her children the truth so they’d know they had two uncles on her side of the family: the first, Elie, a colonel in the Israeli army, and the second, Benjamin, an engineer. Both lived in Tel Aviv.

The father removed his hands from his face and said his wife’s relatives had tried to kill her in 1944 — a group of armed Jews had attacked the house and sprayed it with machine-gun fire. The bullets had mostly hit the kitchen, where they believed Sarah would be. He said he’d removed the bullet holes from the kitchen walls but had left one “so we wouldn’t forget.” He proposed that the children get up so he could show it to them, but none of them moved.

The mother said she was Palestinian and that was her choice, “But you need to know; the Jews are occupying Gaza now, and they won’t be going anywhere.”

“We’ll throw them out,” said Jamal.

“How I wish, my son!” said the mother.

“MON DIEU!” said Catherine. “Is it possible?”

“I didn’t invent the story,” I said, “which means it’s possible. Didn’t you just read about it in this book? Did the Israeli journalist make up the story of the nine Jewish women?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“There is something mysterious,” I said, “but that’s not what the story’s about.”

“They killed her?” asked Catherine.

“No.”

“Her brother, the colonel, came and dragged her to Israel?”

“No.”

“Like me, Jamal discovered that he was Jewish.”

“Like you?”

“No. I mean, I’m not Jewish, just my mother.”

“Your mother’s Jewish?”

“No, my mother’s Catholic, but her mother — her mother’s family were Jews. They converted to Christianity out of fear of persecution, then. .”

“Then what?” I asked.

“I learned the truth from my mother, so I decided to look for my roots and went to Israel.”

“And did you find your roots?”

“I don’t know. No, not exactly. I discovered that it’s not allowed, that we don’t have the right to persecute another people.”

“We don’t?”

“They don’t, the Jews don’t. That’s what I meant.”

I told her that Sarah Rimsky’s story didn’t end with her confession at that family dinner. In fact, that’s where it started.

Jamal the Libyan said his mother was changed after her confession. Her smile was gone, the dark spots on her face and neck multiplied, and the family entered the maelstrom of the prison world.

“But I went to see them,” said Jamal.

Jamal said he discovered that he wasn’t just Palestinian but could be Israeli or German if he so wished. “I went to their house in the Ramat Aviv district in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. I knocked on the door and a blond girl of about seventeen, who looked a lot like my mother, opened it. I told her my name was Jamal Salim, that I was the son of Sarah, her father’s sister. I spoke to her in English, but she answered me in Hebrew. When I said I didn’t know Hebrew, she switched to broken English.

“‘Come in,’ she said.

“I went into the living room, where she asked me to sit down and went off to tell her father.

“Colonel Elie entered, wearing a brown dressing gown. He stood in front of me and said something in Hebrew.

“‘I’m Jamal, Sarah’s son,’ I said in English as I stood up.

“‘You!’”

“‘Yes. Me.’”

“I didn’t expect him to embrace me, no,” said Jamal, “but I did expect that he’d be a little curious, that he might ask how his sister was. Instead, he asked what I wanted.

“‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I wanted to meet you.’

“‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he said and turned his back to me as though asking me to leave. I stood at a loss in the middle of the spartan living room — no other word fits when you compare their living room to the opulent one in our house. I said I wanted to talk with him a bit.

“‘You’re an Arab, right?’

“‘Palestinian,’ I said.

“‘What do we have to talk about?’

“‘Family matters,’ I said.

“‘What family?’

“‘Our family.’

“‘We’re not one family,’ said the colonel.

“‘But you’re my uncle.’

“‘We’re not one family, I tell you. You’re a terrorist. I’m sure terrorists sent you here.’