Song of the Caged Bird by Marcello di Cintio

Author:Marcello di Cintio [Cintio, Marcello Di]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-80905-6
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2014-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

6.

Before 1948, the father of Palestinian philosopher Edward Said owned the Palestine Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem on Salah Eddin Street where he sold books, stationary and typewriters. Said’s father sold the shop after the war, and the new owners divided the space into three tiny storefronts. In 1985, Ahmad Muna(-Abu Imad) rented, and eventually purchased, the middle one. He stocked the shelves with stationary, pens, pencils and other school supplies, and re-opened the following year. He called the store “Educational Bookshop,” dropping “Palestine” from the name. At the time, the Israeli authorities associated the word Palestine with the PLO, which they considered a terrorist organization, and forbade the use of the word in areas under Israeli control. Under the Occupation, words can be contraband.

Ahmad taught full-time at the United Nations schools that operated in Jerusalem at the time, and didn’t open the store until two in the afternoon after he finished teaching. “It was not a serious business,” his son Mahmoud Muna told me as we drank espresso at a sidewalk table on Salah Eddin. “It was an extra thing. His friends would come and hang out there.”

Not long after the shop opened, Mahmoud’s brother, Imad, returned from his studies in Jordan and took over the business from his father. He was a more ambitious businessman than Ahmad. “He put new energy into the store,” Muna said, explaining how his brother added Arabic novels and poetry collections to the store’s inventory. A greater opportunity arose when the First Intifada erupted at the end of 1987. Foreign journalists and NGO workers, most proficient in English, started coming into his shop in search of information about Palestine and the conflict, so the store started bringing in relevant English titles. “We started with books by Edward Said,” Muna said. Demand quickly soared, and by 1992 Muna was picking up packages of books from the post office every couple of days. The bookstore only made small orders, usually less than five copies at a time, to avoid paying extra Israeli import taxes.

In 1996, Edward Said published Peace And Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, a book that railed against the Olso Accords signed three years earlier. The newly formed Palestinian Authority, headquartered in Ramallah, banned both the English and Arabic editions of the book. The PA had no authority in Jerusalem, so the Educational Bookshop was free to stock it. “The book became one of our first bestsellers,” Muna said. Everyone wanted the book—in both languages. Even officials from the very PA ministry that banned Peace And Its Discontents ordered copies and sent their underlings from Ramallah to pick them up.

Sales of English books about the conflict continued to rise. In 1996, Imad made his first visit to the London Book Fair, one of the largest book industry trade fairs in the world. The trip to London marked the Educational Bookshop’s entry into the proper book trade. But at the same time as the store expanded its English-language selection, demand for Arabic books declined.

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