5.0
Beirut Fragments
ByPublisher Description
A landmark memoir that stands as a testament to survival, memory, dignity, and the stubborn beauty of insisting on one’s place in the world, named a 1990 New York Times Notable Book.
Jean Said Makdisi—Palestinian writer, scholar, and sister of the late critic Edward Said—has lived in Beirut since the 1970s. First published in 1990, Beirut Fragments endures as a beautifully wrought, intimate record of civilian life through Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
At once clear-eyed and deeply compassionate, a portrait of everyday survival—shattered streets, sudden silences, the fragile rituals of family life—told with a storyteller’s grace and emotional precision. As Jean and her husband choose to remain in their war-torn city, raising their children and teaching at local universities, she captures both the terror and the tenderness of living through catastrophe.
Amid ongoing regional violence and global patterns of displacement and erasure, Beirut Fragments offers a rare, layered perspective on identity, endurance, and the radical act of staying put when the world tries to unroot you.
Jean Said Makdisi—Palestinian writer, scholar, and sister of the late critic Edward Said—has lived in Beirut since the 1970s. First published in 1990, Beirut Fragments endures as a beautifully wrought, intimate record of civilian life through Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
At once clear-eyed and deeply compassionate, a portrait of everyday survival—shattered streets, sudden silences, the fragile rituals of family life—told with a storyteller’s grace and emotional precision. As Jean and her husband choose to remain in their war-torn city, raising their children and teaching at local universities, she captures both the terror and the tenderness of living through catastrophe.
Amid ongoing regional violence and global patterns of displacement and erasure, Beirut Fragments offers a rare, layered perspective on identity, endurance, and the radical act of staying put when the world tries to unroot you.
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5.0
“This is another book in the new series of classics being reissued by Doubleday/Outsider Editions this year. Those in the collection have been chosen because they have been either overlooked or forgotten "but still speak urgently to this moment" in time.
Jean Said Makdisi, a Palestinian author, has lived in Beirut since the 1970s. Her "war memoir" serves as a history of Lebanon through its fifteen year civil war and that of the war-torn city of Beirut.
The book's structure is a blending of events, culture and observation. It starts with a chronology of events from April 1975 when the war began to 1992, offering a glimpse into the suffering of those times. It then moves to everyday life for Makdisi and her family in the early days of the war and then to a glossary of Beiruti wartime phrases (this is most interesting how everyday works book on new meaning and became part of a wartime lexicon) and onto her upbringing and back to her memories of the war. Her chapter entitled "Remnants" that chronicles the fourteenth anniversary of war's beginning starts on April 13, 1989, with journal-like notations and ends with a statement of people's hope and endurance which she continues in her next chapter, "Beirut Alphabet," where Makdisi starts with the letter Z giving a word and defining it to each letter of the alphabet. In preface to this she writes "Is it possible to hope from the rubble of war... a new form might arise and permit future creativity? There is something of the alpha and omega in this hope "
What is amazing is that Makdisi could have left Beirut but she stayed because of her love for the city continuing to teach and raising her three sons. In this commitment to Beirut she wrote of its physical destruction - it's often heartbreaking to read these moments in her memoir - the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli invasion, "everyday acts of terrorism," attempts at daily life amid the chaos and the spirit and will of the people to survive. It's paean to the city and its people. But as concludes, there is
"nothing unusual about our family's story. It is the story of many of those who lived through the war here, or who are today living through a war somewhere else."
What intrigued me most when I came across this ARC (my thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday) was its importance to history and all of humanity. While I lived through the years of the Lebanese War, I was cosseted a whole continent away; I could experience it from the news but I was safe. To look back in time from Makdisi's remarkable lens makes me realize how woefully unengaged I was - I was raising three children as she was but I never had to worry about the things she did. My children were safe. Her memoir reminds us that we live in a global world and while events might not touch us personally they are events of our time and affect us no matter where we are.
This memoir is so incredibly important. We must never forget, revise or erase history and we must be vigilant to it as well. I investigated the Lebanese War after reading this book because I retain a picture in my mind of the bombing of the Marine barracks in
1983. A multinational peacekeeping group had came to Lebanon to help restore peace but a suicide bomber had other ideas. Today the Middle East is as volatile as ever. Many humans are enduring what Makdisi and her family did - the inhumanity continues.
I highly recommend this book for its truthful and heart wrenching account of war from the perspective of the ordinary person who's experienced it, for the importance of never forgetting, and for the need to keep awareness of inhumanity alive to those of us who live safely and have yet to experience it.
My congratulations to Doubleday/Outsider Editions for selecting this book as part of its inaugural canon.”
About Jean Said Makdisi
JEAN SAID MAKDISI is a Palestinian writer and scholar. She was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family and was raised in Cairo, Egypt, before leaving to study in the U.S. In 1972, Makdisi and her family moved from the United States, where they had lived since 1962, to Beirut, Lebanon, where she taught English and humanities at Beirut University College. They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in1982. Her observations of Beirut’s decline would inform her first book, the memoir Beirut Fragments, published by Persea Books in 1990. In 2005, she published Teta, Mother, and Me, An Arab Woman’s Memoir (London: Saqi Books), which was published the following year (Norton) as Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women.
Other books by Jean Said Makdisi
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