Atef Abu Saif is the author of six novels and since 2019 has been minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The house where I grew up, where I was born, was destroyed a little over a week ago. No one was inside at the time the Israeli missiles hit, flattening it into a perfect pile of rubble.
In losing my family home, I’ve lost a little part of me.
It was in that humble concrete structure, sitting at my grandmother Eisha’s feet, that I heard my first stories. I grew up to become a writer so that I could share them with the world and revisit the life she once had in a grand villa in Jaffa. That was before the Nakba of 1948, before she came to live in the narrow little house that became my family home in the Jabalya refugee camp, having walked over hot sand with thousands of others, her young children in tow.
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I wrote my first short story in that house — never published, of course — about an old man who loved to tell stories but always forgot their endings. At 13, I had begun keeping a notebook in which I scribbled all my drafts. Most of my stories were set in the magical kingdom that was that little house. They captured the daily events of our lives, like the weekly gatherings of the mothers from the surrounding alley, their far-reaching conversations, their gossip, their jokes.
Though it was small — less than 1,000 square feet and only a single story — the house was our haven. It held two main bedrooms and a third, smaller room, a kind of living room. As my brother and I grew older, my father added a second floor to create a playroom for us. To reach it, we climbed a wooden staircase that wobbled with every step. In that playroom, I read my first novels, listened to music and smoked my first cigarette away from my parents’ prying eyes. On the roof next door, I kept baby chickens as pets.
After graduating from university, I planned to get married, so we placed concrete over the rest of the house and built a whole floor, which we divided into two small apartments: one for my future family, and one for my brother Naeem, who had just been released from an Israeli jail. It was in that apartment that Hanna and I started our family, and where I heard the cries of my firstborn. In the new floor’s common room, we would all get together and spend long nights talking, playing cards and smoking narghiles. That’s where I saw Naeem for the last time. It was the night before I left for Italy to study for a PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. Just a few months later, he would be taken from us, felled by an Israel Defense Forces bullet. When I was alone in that room, I could almost hear his voice again — laughing as he told me jokes, or the dreams he’d had in jail.
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In recent years, I would go by the house to visit my aging father. We would sit in the front room, and, as we chatted, I would glance around at the many books and photos, indulging in memories, hearing voices from my childhood, remembering those we’d lost. We have lost so many over the years.
Share this articleShareThe house a writer grows up in is a well from which to draw material. In each of my novels, whenever I wanted to depict a typical house in the camp, I conjured ours. I’d move the furniture around a bit, change the name of the alley, but who was I kidding? It was always our house.
All the houses in Jabalya are small. They’re built randomly, haphazardly, and they’re not made to last. These houses replaced the tents that Palestinians like my grandmother Eisha lived in after the displacements of 1948. Those who built them always thought they’d soon be returning to the beautiful, spacious homes they’d left behind in the towns and villages of historic Palestine. That return never happened, despite our many rituals of hope, like safeguarding the key to the old family home. The future keeps betraying us, but the past is ours.
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Many of the houses around us were owned by members of my extended family. The Abu Saifs were once one of the largest families in Jaffa. Even now, we have relatives living there, inside Israel, with whom we stay in touch. After the Nakba, the Abu Saifs, like all Palestinian families, scattered across the region. Some moved to Gaza, some to Jordan and Lebanon, and others to Egypt. In this way, our house was part of a wider house, the Jaffa Abu Saif house, and in it, we received relatives from around the region, along with their stories.
When I think that our house was less than 1,000 square feet, I begin to doubt the number. It must have been bigger. To me, it felt like a palace, an enormous castle. The greatest building ever constructed.
Though I’ve lived in many cities around the world, and visited many more, that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home. Friends and colleagues always asked: Why don’t you live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students chimed in: Why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same: “Because in Gaza, in an alleyway in the Saftawi neighborhood of Jabalya, there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.”
If on doomsday God were to ask me where I would like to be sent, I wouldn’t hesitate in saying, “Home.”
Now there is no home.
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