Product Overview
From Follett
Previously published as Teta, mother and me : an Arab woman's memoir, London : Saqi, 2005.;Includes bibliographical references (page 399-404).;In my own time -- Jean -- A Cairo childhood -- Men and women, girls and boys -- A kind of education -- 'Ladies, simply ladies' -- Suez -- Ringing the changes -- Beirut -- Teta in history. -- Teta's family origins : the Badrs of Schweir and the Haddads of Abeih -- Homs -- A nineteenth-century Syrian schoolgirl -- Alternative paths --Marriage and war -- Happiness -- Mother's world -- A Palestinian girlhood -- Partings -- Schooldays in Beirut -- Engagement and marriage -- Modern bride, housewife, mother -- Beyond the memoir -- Women together : mother and me -- Beirut revisited -- More letters and war -- Gentle into the night -- Balance. Jean Said Makdisi recounts the experiences she, her mother, and grandmother had while coming of age in the Middle East.
From the Publisher
In this "beautifully written memoir" (Publishers Weekly), Jean Said Makdisi illuminates a century of Arab life and history through the stories of her mother, Hilda Musa Said, and her Teta, "Granny" Munira Badr Musa. Against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel, the Suez crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars, and civil war in Beirut, she reveals the extraordinary courage of these ordinary women, while rethinking the notions of "traditional" and "modern," "East" and "West." With a loving eye, acute intelligence, and elegant, impassioned prose, Makdisi has written "much more than a memoir," rather "an embrace of history and culture" (Cleveland Plain Dealer).