In search of fatima, p.24
In Search of Fatima, page 24
“Oh?” snorted my mother angrily. “Who’s that supposed to fool?” She shook her head sadly. “After all that mother’s done for them, to be repaid like this. And she a widow who sacrificed her whole life to bring them up.”
No one noticed that I was agape with amazement. “Do you mean”, I said to my father “that no Muslim girl, like me say, can ever marry someone who isn’t a Muslim? That I can’t marry Fuad, for example?” Fuad was a Christian Palestinian friend who worked at the BBC with my father.
“No!” my father shouted in exasperation. “You cannot. You should know these things without having to be told.” But I didn’t know, since no one had ever bothered to tell me. In those days I scarcely knew a Muslim of my own age from whom I could have learned what my parents never taught me. I found out much later that under Islamic law, marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man was unlawful, but not the other way around. While conversion of the man to Islam would satisfy the legal requirement for a valid Muslim marriage, social custom meant that such conversions were dismissed as mere ploys designed in effect to permit an outsider male to have sexual access to a Muslim woman. “Marrying out” in such a way was regarded as a sin not ameliorated by conversion, and the people who contracted such marriages were usually either ostracised or spent the rest of their lives apologising for what they had done. In extreme cases, the woman was disowned, expelled from the family circle and regarded to all intents and purposes as having died. In addition, the non-Muslim suitor might face direct threats or even physical attack from the men of the woman’s family. In the Britain of the twenty-first century, very little of this would be news, but in the 1950s the country had not yet become home to the thousands of Muslim immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who settled later and made Islam a familiar creed.
I remember how on that dark winter’s afternoon I went up to my bedroom, leaving my parents downstairs, and sat on my bed, thinking. I had a sense of revulsion and horror. “I am nothing to do with these people,” I finally decided. “They’re intolerant and primitive and I do not belong with them.” I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was part of a higher order of being, liberal, free, English, where such bigotry would not be tolerated.
And there it was left until two or three weeks later, when I had occasion to go to Patricia’s house one afternoon. Patricia Cohen was one of my three best friends at school and she and I were very close. She was a Jewish girl, pretty and petite with long blond hair, ivory white skin and china blue eyes. Patricia had joined the school one year after me and because she was shy and waif-like, I felt sorry for her and we soon made friends, telling each other secrets and visiting each other’s houses after school. My parents grew fond of her and were especially charmed when she learned a few words of Arabic which she used whenever she saw them. Her family likewise took warmly to me and made me feel at home. Patricia’s father was a businessman who lived in Jersey – “for tax reasons”, they always said mysteriously – and came to visit the family from time to time. Her mother, a short, dark, homely woman of Romanian origin, maintained the family house in London on her own. She resented her husband deeply for this and, young as I was, I could sense the unhappiness and tension in Patricia’s house from the first time I ever went there.
Not that her parents were ever anything but the soul of kindness and affection towards me in those days. Patricia’s father was a witty, amusing man who looked and behaved like the stereotypical Jewish comedian. He would hunch his shoulders and move his hands about when he spoke – “Jewish hand signals”, I was told – in a way which I found very funny. He always greeted me with a hug and a kiss whenever he saw me and he would usually say something to make me laugh. Patricia’s mother was like a mother to me too. I used to eat in their house, stay the night, join them on occasions when the extended family – Patricia’s aunts, cousins and their husbands and wives – got together, and became as intimate as if I had been one of them. Amazingly, I think looking back that I was the only “goy”, or non-Jew, with whom they associated so closely and, ironically enough, the only Palestinian they ever met.
On that afternoon when I went to see Patricia I had forgotten all about the mixed marriage conversation at my home. As Patricia let me in, she put her fingers to her lips and, almost walking on tiptoe, ushered me into the kitchen where everyone normally sat. But, whereas I was used on such occasions to a warm greeting from her mother followed at once by tea and a large plate of cakes, this time there was no such welcome. I could see that I had intruded onto a tense family scene. I think I was there only because I was “family” too. Patricia’s mother was pacing the kitchen floor, wringing her hands and looking more round and plump than usual, while Patricia’s elder sister, Claire, sat at the table her eyes cast down as if in shame.
“How could you do it to me? How?” wailed the mother. “Oi, yoi, yoi, what a problem, what a trouble!” I looked at Patricia, mystified, who did not look back. “It’s all your father’s fault, of course. ‘Take them to London’, he said, ‘they might meet nice Jewish boys there which they’re not going to do in Jersey.’ And I came, I believed him.” She was now tearful. “And for this? We should have stayed in Jersey.” She stopped by Claire’s chair threateningly. “Look up, look me in the face and tell me what I did wrong? Didn’t I give you girls everything, clothes, food, time to see your friends while I slaved here? And me all alone, your father never home, too busy enjoying himself to worry.” She suddenly noticed me hovering just inside the room. “Sit down, darling,” she said, “I hope you’re never going to be a trial to your mother, like her.” She jabbed an angry finger at Claire.
Claire spoke for the first time. “It’s not a crime, we’ve only been out a few times,” she murmured in a small voice. This invoked an instant redoubling of the mother’s rage. “So, this is supposed to make me happy?” she demanded. “First, you go out, then he comes here, then I get used to the idea, then you speak to your father who’s not here so he should worry, then you get married! Let me tell you, it’s never going to happen.” To my surprise, Claire suddenly burst into tears. She was older than Patricia, and had always seemed self-possessed, even hard.
“So you should cry!” said her mother relentlessly. “Just as you made me and your aunt Ruby cry. You better do a little thinking next time you want to go against your mother, your father, your whole family.” And with that, her tough manner seemed to collapse and she also started to cry. In the small pause that followed, Patricia signalled to me and we both quietly slipped out of the room. Upstairs, as we sat down on Patricia’s bed, I could hardly wait to find out what that scene was about.
“Well you see,” she said, sighing, “it’s this English boy my sister’s been going out with. I knew about it, but Claire never told anyone else. And then my dear mother had to go and find out, because she picked up the phone when they were talking this morning.”
“Well, so what?” I said. “Who cares? I mean why should it matter if she goes out with an English boy? And what’s this about being English? I thought you were English.”
Patricia looked searchingly at me. “We are English, but we’re still Jewish,” she explained unhelpfully. “Don’t you know about being Jewish? You’re not supposed to marry anyone who isn’t Jewish as well. Even going out with anyone who isn’t Jewish is bad, because you might get hooked on him and get married. That’s why my mother’s so upset, and as my dad isn’t here, I think she’s scared he’s going to blame her for it.”
I stared at her in bafflement, memories of an earlier scene stirring in my mind. “Do you mean to tell me that a Jewish girl like you, say, can’t marry a non-Jewish man?”
“Of course not, silly!” she said, “And the other way around. Didn’t you know that?” But I didn’t, any more than I had known about the Muslim version of the same story.
“And what would happen if Claire went ahead and married her boyfriend just the same?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not sure,” said Patricia. “I know it can be pretty nasty. I suppose no one will speak to her or visit her. She won’t be one of the family anymore.”
“What about if he converts, you know, becomes Jewish? Is it all right then, can they get married?” I asked.
Patricia’s brow puckered in thought. “I don’t think so,” she said uncertainly. “My cousin Ruth’s friend married a goy who converted. All I can tell you is that no one likes him and her family doesn’t let him visit. She always goes on her own, and I don’t think they’re very happy.”
I fell silent, confused by what I had heard in both houses, hers and mine. The parallels were striking, the reactions disturbingly similar. And yet, Palestinians and Jews were supposed to be formal enemies. To us, they should have been alien, another species, with other customs and other ways and feelings. But apparently, they were not so different, at least in these respects. And my parents accepted without demur my friendship with Patricia and other Jewish girls like her. They knew that I stayed with her family and they welcomed her into ours, although they themselves would no more have socialised with her parents than flown to the moon – a polite nod if they happened to come across one another in the shops was as far as either side was prepared to go. For my parents, the lines of demarcation were seemingly clear, but for me there was no such clarity.
They probably thought little about it. For, in a sense, they lived parallel lives to those around them; we could have been anywhere in England for all the difference it would have made to the atmosphere of our home. Since our parents did not engage in the life of the community London never acquired more than a utilitarian function for them. It was the place where our mother shopped and where our father bought his books, but little more. Although London meant more to us children, we also tended to see ourselves as inhabitants of a separate sphere. I do not know how this affected Siham and Ziyad, but to me it imparted a disordered sense of reality whereby at times I saw my Arab life at home as being the more real and concrete while at others it was my burgeoning life in London that came first.
This ambiguity was not helped by my experiences at Henrietta Barnett. As with most girls’ schools, everybody formed cliques sooner or later. Because of the high Jewish intake, the preponderant cliques in my class were Jewish, leaving the rest of us non-Jews to befriend each other. If any of the Jewish girls joined us, they were the ones judged eccentric, like Patricia, or who otherwise did not fit in with the rest of the clique. One of these was an unprepossessing girl called Rachel Samuelson who wore thick-lensed glasses and was considered the class swot. Aside from her academic success, she distinguished herself chiefly by giving us what she described as illustrated sex lessons during lunch break.
Explaining that this was a part of our biology education, she graphically demonstrated to us with the aid of a fountain pen what sexual intercourse involved. But these sessions never lived up to their promise, for she giggled incessantly throughout and we suspected that she knew little about what really happened during sex. Susan Edelman was another one; she was fat and spotty, also wore glasses and had a huge bosom for her age. We all thought her dead common and when, during our next year at school, she fell pregnant, no one was surprised. Miss Leach, looking flustered and her neck a deep red colour, had to explain class by class what the whole school already knew, that Susan would soon be leaving due to her condition. Our chief interest in this event was to try and pump her for information about how “it” felt. At first, she was willing to give us a few tantalising details, but then, tired of our pestering, she finally snapped, “Oh, go and try it out for yourselves!”
After an anxious struggle to find my place in the class, I made friends with two Anglican girls, Josie and Sylvia, and one Jewish girl called Hilary Sternberg. She was the daughter of German Jews, an only child, and lived in a house at the top of the road above ours. When I started to go home with her after school, her mother at first regarded me with suspicion. But this soon disappeared and I was accepted as Hilary’s friend, although never with the warmth I had known in Leslie’s or Patricia’s homes. Hilary looked rather like her father, short and stocky with wiry dark hair and fleshy, pink lips. He was the violinist in a string quartet, all of whose members were German Jews like him. They met regularly at his house. When they were playing, Hilary and I would stand and listen outside the double doors of the dining room where they sat around the table. They played Mozart and Brahms and Beethoven, and that seemed thrilling to me. When they stopped for a break, Hilary’s mother would take them salami and smoked salmon sandwiches with pickled gherkins of which we also had a share.
Arab–Israeli politics did not feature in my relationship with Hilary or her family, or indeed with the other Jewish girls in the class. She visited me at home and her mother and mine nodded to each other politely enough if they happened to meet in the street. “I bet you’ve been to the Arab house again,” Hilary’s mother would often tease her. “You stink of garlic!” Other than this, no one on either side questioned our friendship with each other.
Which is not to say that my parents had no feelings at all towards Jews. One day, when my mother was out shopping, she stopped at the greengrocer’s on Golders Green Road to buy some fruit. As she fingered the pears on display outside – a habit which used to infuriate the greengrocer who would shout at her from inside, “Don’t touch me till I’m yours, love” – she found herself next to a foreign-looking, black-haired couple. To her amazement, they were speaking to each other in Arabic. “Are you Arabs?” she asked eagerly, as she was always looking for someone to talk to. The woman looked uncomfortable. “Iraqis”, she answered. My mother suddenly understood. “You’re Iraqi Jews, aren’t you?” The couple nodded. “And what about you?” they asked. “I’m an Arab from Palestine,” my mother answered. They looked even more uncomfortable.
“How could you do it to us?” my mother cried. “How could you throw us out of our homes and send us far away from our country?” When she said this, the couple seemed to get genuinely upset. “We would never have wanted that, believe me,” said the man. “But we got there after the damage was done, and we haven’t done well either. We should never have left Iraq. They cheated us with all sorts of promises, but we didn’t fit in in Israel and we left.”2 “Now we can’t go back to Iraq,” said the woman, “and we’re stranded here, like you.” They invited my mother to visit them and were eager to find out where we lived. But my mother declined. As she said afterwards, “I know they meant well and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. But what comfort could we of all people be expected to offer them?”
Despite this incident, she always maintained that she distinguished between “the Jews”, that is those whom she held responsible for our plight, and individual Jewish people, for whom she felt no personal animosity any more than she had done in the Palestine of her youth – before the troubles started. I did not know until many years later that the major reason for our apparent tolerance of the Jewish presence in Golders Green was due not so much to this attitude as to something else altogether, one which should have called into question the larger issue of our whole presence in Britain. Although my father and many other Palestinians appreciated full well the Zionist plan for Palestine to which we had fallen victim, in a curious way he did not blame the Jews. He placed the primary responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the British who had betrayed us. “If you let a thief into your house and he robs you,” he was fond of saying, “who is to blame, you or the thief? It was the British who were in power in our country. They had a sacred trust not to abandon us. And we believed in them right to the end.” But when the time came, they did abandon us to our fate; and it was what he called their heartless, callous betrayal that rankled with my father. “If you ask me why I was not too bothered about the Jews of Golders Green when you were growing up,” he told me later, “that was the reason.”
As a schoolgirl, I knew little of this and unthinkingly adopted my parents’ lack of hostility towards Jews. This stance was not difficult to maintain, for in my school – or so it seemed – we, girls, related to each other in an ordinary way. Judaism was not alien to me; quite the contrary, for Muslims it was a familiar and respected religion and I readily recognised Jewish rituals and holy days. Many of their attitudes to the world around them – family, children, friendships – were more recognisable to us Muslim Arabs than anything we found among the Christian English.
Furthermore, events in the Middle East did not feature in my life at that time. I did not listen to the news or read the newspapers and I took less and less interest in what my father and his friends talked about. I was unaware that Israel was rapidly building its institutions, developing a huge arsenal of arms, gaining international acceptance, and entrenching itself in the region. I did not know that the UN had set up the Palestine Conciliation Commission in 1949 to negotiate (fruitlessly) with Israel a way to compensate the displaced Palestinians for the loss of their possessions. We would have been included in such a deal had it succeeded, but no one mentioned such things at home. My parents never spoke about our material losses in Palestine – our house, our belongings, my grandfather’s land – nor that we should ever demand restitution. I think, like many other Palestinians, they feared that if they ever did so and succeeded they would in effect have been bought off, would have sold a patrimony no money could buy.
My chief concern in the meantime was not any of this but how to keep running with the pack at school, terrified I would be left behind. I was oblivious as to whether those who made up the pack were Jewish or not, and I had no reason to suppose they felt any differently towards me. I recall no specific prejudice directed against me at that time from any of them, but that they merely preferred each other’s company over the rest of us. Ironically, the instances of prejudice, if I can call it that, to which I was subjected came only from non-Jews. This racism was by no means extreme and could not be compared with the much cruder racial harassment that overtook British society later; but it shocked and hurt me to a degree that betrayed the extent to which I had come to believe myself a part of English society.
