1Jabara: MemoriesAbdeen Jabara stretched out his crimson-stained fingers. Balancing on his toes, the eight-year-old met the tree branch that his elder brother, Khalid, lowered for him. Quickly, he pulled off a few plump mulberries and dropped them into the basket below.
The two trees that the Jabara family was circling sat on a patch of land in northern Michigan owned by an elderly couple who didn’t quite know what to do with these berries. But their wide, leafy trees were a boon to Abdeen’s mother, Mymonie. The fondness for their sweet tartness was a family inheritance, passed down from her Syrian mother. Mymonie would bake the mulberries into a cobbler when the Jabaras returned home to Mancelona.
Abdeen sneaked a couple into his mouth, with one eye on his sister, who stood nearby. Mymonie had been so busy raising six other children that when Abdeen was born, Essie, the eldest, became a second mother to him. Brother and sister had fifteen years between them, and it was Essie who rocked Abdeen to sleep, read him his favorite book about a lion in the jungle, turned her gaze away from his mischiefs.
In front of the Jabara family, the turquoise waters of Torch Lake gleamed alluringly in the July heat. While their father Sam took the kids for a swim, Mymonie would saunter by the road and search for wild grape leaves. Maybe next week the boys would wade into the river near town for her and collect bushels of the watercress that carpeted the water. Abdeen was sure his mother was the only one in town with two ovens: an electric stove for cooking, just like everyone else, and a wood-burning one that she used to make flatbread. Their table was always lined with fatayer of spinach and meat and warm plain pitas that would be dipped in dense yogurt.
Soon the days would cool, and the boys would start hunting. Khalid had handed Abdeen a toy rifle a short while ago. Donning a white cap over his golden curls, Abdeen studied Khalid as he crouched down to the dirt and aimed at a rabbit. In a few months, his brothers, cousins, and uncles and Sam would go off on their annual Christmastime hunts.
But not yet. For now, there was still summer to be had. The Jabara family loaded their treasure of berries and themselves onto Sam’s black Dodge truck and headed back toward Mancelona.
•
S.A. Jabara Grocery store stood on the corner of State and Maple streets, just west of the post office. On windy days, whiffs of smelting iron reached town from the factory, just beyond the tracks, that produced ingots and carbon iron for the rest of the United States. Technically, the area around the factory was unincorporated land, but workers and their families settled there in bare-bones housing—Abdeen was shocked to learn they lacked indoor plumbing—and came into Mancelona to attend school or buy groceries. Jabara may have been an unusual name to the visitors, but perhaps not more so than Moeke or Rahilly or Ludwig, whose businesses also lined the streets.
The first time Sam and Mymonie met was on their wedding day, in 1924. Sam had been twenty when he traveled from Greater Syria to the United States. He had left an entire life behind, one in which he was born Mohammed Ali Jabara. His parents mortgaged a bit of land to pay for his ship passage from the Beirut harbor to Marseilles to New York, where he became Sam. He peddled, worked at a tannery, got injured and spent his recovery learning English, joined the army just like fourteen thousand other Arabs, then was medically discharged for severe asthma. Now a merchant, it was time to settle down. Sam phoned relatives in Flint, Michigan. Did they know of a nice Arab girl? They did, in fact, know a family in Ross, North Dakota, who had emigrated from a village in Syria not far from Sam’s own. The Mellems had a lovely daughter.
Mymonie rode a train to Duluth, Minnesota, wearing a simple and delicate dress. Her only embellishments were a pearl necklace and a rose pinned below her right collar. Sam towered above her in a crisp three-piece suit decorated with a gold pocket watch. Mymonie could see that behind his thick mustache, he was handsome. They visited the World’s Fair in Chicago as a new couple, where Mymonie posed atop a replica of a camel. She hated photos, believing that a click of the camera took a bite out of one’s soul. But she dutifully looked toward the lens, a knee-length polka-dot dress arranged over her legs.
Sam gave Mymonie the option of settling in Mancelona, a small town in northern Michigan where he owned a general store, or Detroit, where he had some relatives and where a few hundred Arab families had built a budding community. Mymonie had grown up in the isolated farmlands of North Dakota—a city was foreign to her.
When they moved to Mancelona, the village was not much more than a few paved roads and wooden boardwalks. There was a dime store, a haberdashery, and one newspaper. It would be a couple of years before the first snowplow would pass through, and for a while Sam delivered fresh produce and cured meats by horse and buggy. The family grew with the town itself. When Abdeen was born, in 1940, one of the original pioneers was still living.
At the store, when a customer asked, Sam drew a map to show where the Jabaras hailed from. He traced the coastline of the Levant and marked a dot. He and Mymonie were from that tiny corner, just by the Mediterranean, Sam explained. They were Syrian.
You mean Assyrian? the reply usually came.
Khalid and Essie, who often helped at the store, were embarrassed. They hated when their father traced the family tree, or when he spoke to them in Arabic in front of the townspeople. Or worse still, their friends. Baee, they pleaded, don’t speak in Arabic. This annoyed Sam. He didn’t care who heard, he snapped back.
•
There was a big discussion in the house one day, and tensions were high. One of Abdeen’s older sisters, Frieda, was participating in a school cherry pie–baking contest. Everyone knew that the crust tasted better if you used lard instead of Crisco, but lard was made of pig fat, and no one in the Jabara household consumed pork. After much arguing, Sam and Mymonie agreed that Frieda could make the crust with lard—as long as she didn’t eat her own pie. She won.
The drama was past when a delivery arrived all the way from Rashid Sales, a record store in Brooklyn. The large box was carried to the living room, which was packed with rugs and brass lamps and inlaid wooden tables that Sam had managed to import from Damascus. The family crowded around the box to inspect the treasure inside.
Abdeen insisted on opening the lid and snatched away the paper inside to reveal a shiny record album cover. More lay underneath. The kids took them out cautiously and handed them to Sam. Mymonie had grown up hearing Arabic at home, but only Sam could read the writings on the covers. The children, even Abdeen, caught on to a few words and phrases. Haram, for instance. Or when Sam was upset, his bottom teeth would cover his top lip and he would say Shoo deenu?—What’s his religion? It was shorthand for asking, What kind of person is he? But that was the extent of it. Their father spoke a language they could not quite access.
Sam laid the record into the player, and music cascaded through the house.
•
One evening in 1948, when Abdeen was not yet nine, he found his father sitting in a chair in the family room. The china cabinet behind him held an English translation of the Qur’an, gathering dust. It was strange to find his father alone. Sam was always at the store, or in the garden with Mymonie. She tended to her violets, chickpeas, and peppery leaves as if they were her children. A neighbor once remarked that she could “plant a broomstick and make it grow.” Even Sam had come to love gardening, and every year the couple competed with Bill Schroeder, across the street, to see who could produce the first ripe tomato of the season.
But tonight Sam was inside, all alone. Abdeen wasn’t sure if his father had noticed him enter. Sam’s head was bent low, his ear leaning toward the mesh of their brown Stromberg Carlson radio. Usually Sam cut a strong figure in any room. He rarely left the house without a tie, and he commanded every conversation, charmed any gathering. Abdeen had never seen his face contorted as it was now.
The voice on the radio was crackling, urgent. All Abdeen could recognize was that it was speaking in Arabic. Later, this memory would come with great clarity, after he recognized that this was the first time he heard of the Nakba, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of their homes by Israeli forces. That night, however, watching Sam, all Abdeen could gather was that something very bad was happening, somewhere very far away.
Copyright © 2026 by Rozina Ali. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
