From the late 1960s, battles between Palestinian commandos and Israeli forces accelerated Marjayoun’s depopulation and decay. Shadid’s great-grandmother, Bahija, remained there until her death in 1965, after which Christians from the nearby village of Aishiyya plundered the house. The largely Greek Orthodox village had suffered mass emigration (its 1912 population of 3752 had shrunk to 800 by 2006) and the loss of farmland that fell on the wrong side of the Israeli border in 1948. The decline of Bayt Samara coincided with Marjayoun’s. The house was mahjour – ‘abandoned, forsaken, lonely’. Shadid visited the stone ruin one day at the end of Israel’s 2006 summer invasion to find that a partially exploded Israeli rocket had caused a fire on an upper floor. Shadid’s paternal great-grandfather, Isber Samara, built a villa in the south Lebanese hill village of Marjayoun during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Translates literally as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. As he wrote in this account of his struggle to reclaim his Lebanese patrimony, he yearned for the continuity of the bayt.

As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance.Īnthony Shadid was an exception. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself.

They graduated from peddling linens and household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Within a generation, they had forgotten their Arabic and were deserting their churches. With his Ottoman moustache, three-piece suit and bundles of goat’s cheese and stuffed vine leaves, Uncle Tannous incarnated all that the Americanising immigrants were desperate to escape, but couldn’t, quite.ĭescendants of the Lebanese emigrants who began arriving in the New World after the massacres of Christians in Greater Syria in the 1860s for the most part divorced themselves from the Old Country. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese heart beating within the American persona of Thomas’s character. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. Hans Conried was a comic actor of Austrian Jewish origin, who portrayed the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. When Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma in 1968, the only Lebanese personality most Americans knew was not Lebanese at all.

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