Sadness Is a White Bird by Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Author:Moriel Rothman-Zecher [Rothman-Zecher, Moriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Your grandmother Selsabeel Ziad was eighteen years old when she married. Her new husband, Marwan al-Shiltawi, was a very thin man, nineteen years old with large, dark eyes and an already-thick mustache. He was from Kufr Qanut, by way of another village, called Shilta. Kufr Qanut was far away from Beit al-Asal but had become home to a shepherd named Musa al-Shiltawi, a dear friend of Selsabeel’s father, your great-grandfather Ahmad Ziad. Ahmad Ziad and Musa al-Shiltawi had fought together in a makeshift brigade, against the Zionists, eight years before, in 1948. Both had been reluctant to fight; both were peaceful men. But once they heard what had happened in Deir Yassin, where the Jews had lined the villagers up in the streets before slaughtering them like animals, and then, a few months later, in Lydda, where the Jews had massacred frightened refugees huddled in a mosque, they realized that they had no choice. Each man took hold of a rifle. To steel their hearts, they would imagine their beautiful families, lined up against a wall.

But they were untrained and barely armed, compared to the Zionist forces, and most of Musa’s and Ahmad’s comrades’ bodies fell lead-ridden and limp along the plains of central Palestine. The Jews crashed forward like a wave. Musa’s tiny village, Shilta, was subsumed and destroyed. Most of the villagers were expelled into Gaza, but Musa’s family managed to escape the forced march into exile and found refuge with distant relatives in Kufr Qanut. Ahmad Ziad’s village, Beit al-Asal, was spared thanks to the intervention of a Druze leader who had pledged allegiance to the Jews but who remembered fondly the evenings in which he would sit for coffee with his Muslim neighbors in Beit al-Asal, before.

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