Sahar Hamouda, Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem, London: Garnet Publishing Ltd, January 2010
From: Al-Ahram Weekly
Reviewed by Amira Nowaira
Despite its title, Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem is no fairy tale. It offers no simple answers and provides no happy ending. And neither does it rehash platitudes or sentimentalities about the traumatic decades in Palestinian history leading to the Nakba.
The book, straddling the space of memoir and social history, tells the story of a Jerusalem home, Dar Al-Fitiani, located within the walls of the Haram Al-Sharif (the Sacred Enclosure) in Old Jerusalem and built originally as an Islamic school in the 15th century. The book also tells the story of the Palestinian family that lived in it continuously for at least five hundred years until 1948.
Through two voices, Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem recreates the life of a family living in one of the most coveted, and perhaps the most fiercely contested, spaces on the planet. The first voice is that of Hind Al-Fitiani, the author’s mother, who spent her early years in the Dar until she left to study at the Beirut University College (now the Lebanese American University) in 1946, not knowing that she would never return to live again in the home of her ancestors, the forces of history having “crashed upon their world and brought it to an end forever.” She found herself obliged to relocate to Egypt with some members of her family.
Commenting on Hind’s story is her daughter, Sahar, who, through meticulous research, tried to verify the authenticity of the information given in her mother’s oral narrative. To do that, she consulted historical documents and interrogated other members of the family. Her voice, rational and sometimes sceptical, counterbalances and puts in perspective her mother’s spontaneous and heart- felt narrative.
Family life in Dar Al-Fitiani during the 1930s and 1940s was not idyllic by any stretch of the imagination. It was a stiflingly conservative world of “confined women and harsh men.” The father, Abdel-Hamid Al-Fitiani, was the typical patriarch, an “Old Testament type, tyrannical and awesome, breathing nothing but fire and brimstone.” He “didn’t need to raise a hand against any of us,” Hind remembers, “he merely threw a fiery look and we trembled.”
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