Reja-e busailah free download

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Text size A A A. Cody and his wife Gabriella gave Grandpa three great-grand sons. Also surviving are numerous nieces and nephews. His many "readers" also survive: all the kind people who have read to him over the years and helped him type his writings. They are family to us. Also surviving is the whole town of Kokomo, whose adopted son he was. Indeed, he is being mourned here, across the country, and around the world as tributes pour in from friends, artists, poets, and writers.

Blind since infancy, Reja-e broke all the molds. He never let anyone tell him no. His determination and feistiness were unparalleled. He was an intellectual man of letters, a thrill seeker, a world traveler, a great host, and a lover of people, great food, strong coffee, music, art, animals especially cats, and walks in Highland Park.

He was a dominate physical presence with his bone-crunching handshake, baritone voice, and back-cracking hugs. His accomplishments are too numerous to mention here as right now people everywhere are sharing personal stories of how this man impacted their lives. Helping others gave Reja-e his greatest joy.

Just to chronicle his achievements let us note the following: he earned a B. Together this couple founded Project Loving Care, a charity for orphaned Palestinian children which they ran out of their home for decades before it became The United Holy Land Fund.

Busailah and his seeing eye dogs were an icon on and off campus. He loved his colleagues and students and had many loudish parties at his residence for his students where he said "the floor shook. Reja-e mourned and raged about the destruction of his hometown of Lydda, Palestine, all detailed in his memoir.

Yet, he created his own village here: the fruit stand people, the shoe store, the grocery check-out people, the pharmacist, his favorite waitresses he asked for by name and who doted on him, and all his doctors and nurses, his dentist, veterinarian, and anyone Reja-e ran into. He made us slow down and remember that we are people first and businesses second. Reja-e took another blind leap of faith when he found love again and married Tanya Roberts in She was his match in all things adventure, travel, writing, and art.

Together they formed an ironclad bond with ropes of steel. The massacre in Deir Yassin. Palestinians forced into the sea at Jaffa. And of course we all have seen pictures of the processions of Palestinians walking east toward the West Bank as the land was cleansed. But the storytelling of the Nakba here has been limited, and one thing that is missing is an appreciation of the culture that was lost.

Without speaking Arabic, it must be impossible to comprehend the robust civilization whose destruction has been mourned by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Edward Said and Fouzi el-Asmar. That is the majesty of this memoir that I have several times referred to in recent weeks. Reja-e Busailah was a blind year-old high school senior when he and his family were forced out of Lydda to the West Bank. He landed on his feet. He studied in Cairo then New York. He taught English literature for 30 years at Indiana University.

Yes, one of the lucky ones. But the achievement of his memoir is that Busailah has carried his anger at being made a refugee down through 7 decades and used it to etch a detailed picture of all that was lost when Zionists took over his land. In the Land of My Birth is a portrait of the scholar as a young man. I have never seen either him or the book since.

By the end of this memoir, Busailah and his family have been uprooted, too, and we fully comprehend his sharpest resentment of the Zionists: they purported to represent a superior culture. No: he describes a noose tightening around the city as it empties, then mortar fire from the neighboring Jewish town, and raiding soldiers.

It still cuts at Busailah that The Nation in published an account of the emptying of Lydda saying that the residents simply fled. I understand his rage. This was a truly existential experience for him.

Alone in the house, he held out as long as he could not believing that the Jews really were as strong as the Arab resistance. The final moment seemed very close, the moment of facing the longtime enemy, for most people the enemy from childhood, for many the enemy from birth.

There had never been a genuine Palestinian leadership in the sense of something to rally around, something to entrust with higher, if vague, responsibilities, an authority that would give guidance and directives in times of crisis.

It was as if each individual were almost the entire chain of command. Now, everyone, had to face both the present moment and the future alone, a host of atoms united only in their sense of panic and helplessness, unified by invisible ties to face an implacable enemy. The blind youth was among the last to leave Lydda and walk to the West Bank in a flood of refugees, coins hidden in his underclothing.

The expulsion has defined his life; and his precision reminds the reader of the tone of Holocaust testimonies. Of course, Nakba histories are generally considered credible only when they come from Israeli writers. Yitzhar Smilansky, for instance. Shavit revealed the ethnic cleansing of Lydda to The New Yorker readership five years ago, and then to scores of synagogues that he visited to sell his book, My Promised Land , saying that the Lydda expulsion was regrettably necessary to establish a Jewish state.

Busailah has a different view of the matter: it was a historical crime, never accounted for. There is no better way to convey his achievement than to quote passages that speak for themselves, two of them involving violence and mental illness. He loved poetry and he liked to shock. He loved to tease me by reading poems with sexual allusions.

I liked to hear the poems and I pretended to be shocked. He was very popular among the students. He had a good heart— better, some thought, than his mind. He was quite happy-go-lucky.

But he had more than his humor. Later his name would be announced on the radio on the list of those who had passed the matriculation exam. I was surprised and delighted.

Not much Later his name came up again. Shortly before the fall of Lydda he was shot between the eyes in a trench at dawn when the Jews overran his village.

They said his mother was never in her right mind afterward. We called him al-Zatmeh, someone who clings to you until he gets what he wants, like a tick…. He was in his forties or fifties. He was big and very heavy, probably you would say obese.