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Also by Jean Said Makdisi:

Teta, Mother, and Me, May 2006
Hardcover

Teta, Mother, and Me
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
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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."

Comments

1 comment posted.

Re: Teta, Mother, and Me

Loved it,loved it,loved it. It reflects the life of a lot of Lebanese women, their mothers and their grand mothers; it brings back pictures of Lebanon from mid 1800 onward.
(Christine Sayegh 1:52pm July 22, 2010)