Musings from Arab America

During our holidays this summer we were fortunate to be able to stay with my wife’s extended Lebanese family on both the east and west coasts of the United States. It had been almost six years since we last visited, and I must say that staying in an Arab-American household lessened the shock of fitting into the American way of life; a kind of decompression chamber if you will. Behind closed doors nothing really changed; the family was as tight-knit as ever and if it wasn’t for the green lawn outside the window and the lack of blowing horns and shouting in the streets we could have all been sitting in Beirut. Both Lebanese-American families we stayed with were forced to leave during war. The husband of my wife’s cousin, who is originally Palestinian, remembers when in 1948, at the age of eight, he was forced to flee his village