When Grandpa’s son from his first wife was killed, Grandpa wanted to take revenge. Akab had been a real hero, one of the Rebels. He’d had a horse, a gun, and a belt full of grenades. One Friday, he took a bullet. The bullet hit the belt, and all the grenades went off at once. His body scattered in every direction. Grandma says the whole family worked till nightfall to gather up his head and his shoulders, so they would have something to bury. He had a face as round as the full moon.

Grandma says that at night, after the burial, my grandfather went up on the roof of the school building. There was an Iraqi outpost there and they’d take turns behind the Bren hidden in the bags of sand. Grandpa heard the Jews coming closer. He heard the commander say “Forward, forward”—Grandma whispered the word in Hebrew. The first bullet hit the commander, the one who’d said “Forward,” and Grandpa saw the Jews in a state of panic, trying to get away. Grandpa put the Bren to good use and sewed them together “like a Singer.” “They’re cowards, the Jews, but the British, those Ingliz dogs, preferred them,” my grandmother says.

The Ingliz got into Grandpa and Grandma’s house once. That was before my father was born. They turned everything upside down: spilled salt on the sugar, smashed bowls, and peed right in front of her. Grandma says one of them sat on the big container of olives and took a shit right into it. They poured everything out afterward, and saw the Englishman’s shit, big chunks.

The People in Tira Used to Be Braver

The people in Tira used to be braver and kept all the Jews out. Once, some Jews tried to get into the village by pretending to be Arabs. They came with kaffiyehs. But Abu el-Abed knew they were Jews. He’d been working in the wheat fields with his family, and he’d seen them. When he told the people around him that they were Jews, they thought he’d gone crazy. “What’s got into you. They’re the Iraqi soldiers,” they told him.

But Abu el-Abed was certain he was right. He could tell Jews by the way they walked. He told his friends, “One shot in the air, and we’ll know. If they’re Arabs, they’ll shout to us; if they’re Jews, they’ll lie down flat on the ground.” As soon as he fired, they all went down in the dust. It was obvious that they were Jews. Abu el-Abed and the other men stayed there, shooting and scaring them, and the women and children hurried home, shouting in the streets, “Ya ahl al-balad, al-Yahud akhduna!” (“People of the village, the Jews have come to occupy us!”)

All the men went out. Handsome, brave, unwavering, as if they were going to a wedding. The women accompanied them with za‘aruta, the traditional cries of happiness. They hardly had any guns. They held sticks and knives, stones and spades, and wouldn’t let any Jew come near. That day, they managed to seize three bodies of Israeli soldiers.

Abu el-Abed and some of the fighters in Tira tied them to horses and dragged them to the Iraqi army headquarters in Tulkarm. They wanted to prove it was possible to kill Jews. Their aim was to encourage the Arab soldiers and persuade them to fight. But the Iraqis said, “Maku awamer, maku slakh” (“We have no orders, we have no ammunition”).

One time they were even braver than that and wouldn’t let Kahana in. We heard on the news that he was planning to come to Tira. They announced on the mosque loudspeakers: “Ya ahl al-balad, Kahane is arriving tomorrow to take back the released prisoners. If he gets in, it will be our disgrace.”

By five the following morning, I was already out with my father at the entrance to the village from the direction of Kfar Sava and Ramat Ha Kovesh. There were some people there blocking the roads with tires. Father said the workers shouldn’t be allowed out. He said everyone had to defend the village, and that when the Jews lose out on a day of work, they get furious. “Do you know how much we’re making them lose by not going to work?”

Police vans drew up, and my father and a few other people sat down in the middle of the road. I wasn’t scared. I sat down with them. The mayor spoke with the policemen, and they moved back. Soon the entire village had rallied. Thousands blocked the entrance. An airplane circled overhead, and Father said they were taking pictures of us from the air. He pulled his shirt up over his face and taught me how to do it too, just like the kids you see on TV.

That day Father and I were late coming home. Mother and Grandma were very worried. They waited under the eucalyptus trees at the front of the house. I felt like a man. I wasn’t afraid. But all they wanted was to make sure my father was all right. They didn’t even ask me what had happened.

Nothing had happened actually. Kahane didn’t come. At school the next day the kids said they’d broken the windows of the police vans with bricks, and they said Kahane had come into the village that night through the orange groves of Tel Mond, dressed as a woman.

A Third-Year Student

My father wrote that the holiday meant nothing to him. That it didn’t evoke the least emotion. That his real holiday hadn’t come yet, and that when it did he wouldn’t be the only one to rejoice; everyone would rejoice. He also wrote that there was a special Visitors’ Day for the holiday and that, as a one-time exception, visitors might bring in a kilo of holiday sweets.

The postcards were sent from Damon prison, P.O. Haifa, March 1970. He had been in jail for a year by then. I know because there’s also a copy of Ha’aretz from March 1969 in the suitcase, with an item about my father’s being arrested. It links him to the explosion in the Hebrew University cafeteria.

According to the letters and the papers, my father was in jail for more than two years. There’s a thick layer of dust over the papers. Inside Father’s matriculation certificate, I found a dried spider. His grades weren’t that good, but he always says that the grades in his day didn’t come close to the ones we get nowadays, and that someone who got a 70 back then was smarter than someone who gets 100 today. Grandma kept all his report cards. She can’t read, but she knows what’s important. Up to ninth grade he had only hundreds. The comments at the bottom said he should try to settle down, to be good, to be less noisy. The report card at the end of eleventh grade says: Promoted to twelfth grade on condition that he obeys the rules.

Sometimes I think nobody except Grandma and me knows about the letters, the newspaper clippings, and those report cards. Judging by the dust, I must be the only other person to look at them. I rummage through the papers, sorting them by date, by place, by institution, and put them down next to my grandmother.

She doesn’t even notice me. I have to position myself directly in front of her and shout my name in her ear before she realizes that I should get a hug and a kiss. She sits there, rocking, in front of the heater, fingering her prayer beads, listening to Voice of Amman, and waiting for the next call of the muezzin.

In all his letters from prison, Father wrote to Grandma too. “Tell my dear mother” or “This is for my beloved mother” or “Tell the dearest person of all.” He usually sent the letters to his brothers-in-law, my aunts’ husbands. In all of them, he sounded all right — or at least as if he was trying to sound all right. In October 1969, in the oldest postcard I found, he said that the problems of adjusting to life in jail were behind him. There were people you wouldn’t usually have a chance to meet, and he got along well with them. In one of the letters, he told Uncle Bashir he was slowly turning into an abu-ali, a big shot.

In a later letter, after a sixth-month remand, he wrote about the wonderful library and said he spent all his time there, studying.