Purchase

Amazon

Add to Wish List

Also by Jean Said Makdisi:

Teta, Mother, and Me, May 2006
Hardcover

TETA, MOTHER, AND ME
By: Jean Said Makdisi

A brilliant personal and cultural history spanning 125 years in the life of an Arab Christian family.

W. W. Norton
May 2006
384 pages
ISBN: 0393061566
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Non-Fiction Memoir

Jean Said Makdisi explores her own life and those of her mother and grandmother (Teta) as they create and sustain their families through the astonishing events of the twentieth century in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel, the Suez crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars, and civil war in Beirut, Makdisi reveals the extraordinary courage of ordinary women.

With a loving eye and acute intelligence, Makdisi provides a woman's view of culture as it is actually lived: a grandmother's Bible reading at night; a mother's memories of camaraderie at school; an aunt's charitable activities on behalf of Palestinian refugees; a little girl's duty to gather her brother's tennis balls. Throughout, Makdisi leads us to question assumptions about what is "modern" and what "traditional," Eastern and Western, "repressed" and "liberated."

Media Buzz

Diane Rehm Show - NPR - May 31, 2006