I can still feel the warmth and light of the Southern sun on my 5-year-old face as I walked the block and a half up Texas Avenue in Shreveport to visit Aunt Lillie Beiruti--Aunt Lillie from Beirut--to distinguish her from another Aunt Lillie in the sprawling Syrian family who were our neighbors, friends and confidants on that polyglot street of immigrants.
First came Mr. Baker's furniture store next door, then Mrs. Nader's dry-goods shop, where she had maintained her silent vigil for years. Dressed in black, she remained in mourning for her boy Bill, who had been lost in the Pacific theater. I always shifted to the outside edge of the broad sidewalk, lest I disturb her. Or myself, for she seemed only a dim spectral vision within, the neighborhood ghost.
Then came the Brainis' shoe-repair shop, a twin of our own, where my friend Leon lived, like all the other families on the Avenue, above the Braini's store.
Finally came the Ferris' confectionary, where Aunt Lillie Beiruti kept rolling and rolling and rolling out the fine phyllo dough again and again, which was not just translucent but had to be transparent. Anything thicker would not do, and would have to be set aside for lesser delicacies, for nothing was ever to be wasted. She was making Baklewi, she called it in Arabic, though the Greeks called their version Baklava.
As every poor immigrant knew, or soon learned, waste today and starve tomorrow. I was half-grown before I realized the Yiddish word for sin, averah, didn't mean waste. As in, "it would be an averah to throw this out."
Everything was to be used, even tears, which a rising new generation of Syrians have turned into poetry to describe their people's latest sufferings. And there have been many. Since the civil war there erupted, more than 200,000 Syrians have been killed, more than 4 million have fled the country, almost 5 million displaced within whatever's left of Syria, and now masses of Syrians have joined the flood, dashing themselves against Europe's closed gates.
Want to know what would happen in a world in which America drew back into isolation? Just look at today's headlines.
Or talk to Amal Kassir, a 20-year-old college junior who wrote "My Grandmother's Farm" while waiting tables at her folks' Syrian restaurant in Littleton, Colo., after her family finally made it to America, mother of exiles. As my own mother, 19-year-old Sarah Ackerman, did in 1921, when Europe was in its usual chaos.
My grandmother knows Syria
better than anyone.
It is the arthritis living in her knees.
She had a farm whose dust
she knew by name . . .
And the tyrant,
The dirt is waiting for him,
Like the rest of us.
He will learn his grave,
Feel the weight of the entire country
on his chest.
It is all there, the age-old pain of exile, and the just as old yearning for useless revenge.
"I had a dry spell with my poetry for nine months," says Amal Kassir. "I was rooted in depression. I felt the world had betrayed us."
Welcome to the vast club.
From inside what is left of Syria, Najaf Abdul Samad, a doctor in Sweida, writes: "When I am overcome with weakness, I bandage my heart with women's patience in adversities. I bandage it with the upright posture of a Syrian woman who is not bent by bereavement, poverty or displacement as she rises from the banquets of death and carries on shepherding life's rituals. She prepares for a creeping, ravenous winter and gathers the heavy firewood branches, stick by stick from the frigid wilderness. She does not cut a tree, does not steal, does not surrender her soul to weariness, does not ask anyone's charity, does not fold with the load, and does not yield midway."
It all sounds familiar. Of course. The words are strikingly similar to the last 22 verses of Proverbs that a Jewish husband is enjoined to read every Sabbath eve to his wife in her praise. ("Oh, who can find a wife who is above price, even rubies? . . . She would work with wool or flax, gladly, at manual labor. . . . She rises while it is still dark to feed her family . . . Strength and glory surround her, and she is always cheerful.")
What oppressed people has not sung the praises of its women for saving it in its darkest hours? So it has been since the days the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt, and only the women held the nation together. So it is with the Syrians today.
We have so much in common. Let us understand and respect, even love, one another,
Maybe that's what W.H. Auden had in mind in his poem, "September 1, 1939"--
We must love one another or die.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 11/15/2015