‘They Even Assassinated My Library’

They Even Assassinated My Library

By Atef Abu Saif

They even assassinated my library.

Before they withdrew from the Saftawi neighborhood near Jabalia Camp, the Israeli Army bombed the building where my two apartments are located.

On the first day of the “truce,” as the displaced returned to areas occupied by the Israeli military, my brother Mosa sent me WhatsApp images of the five-story building turned to rubble. For my brothers and sisters, whose homes had been destroyed earlier in the war, these two apartments were the only hope of finding shelter and a place to live in Jabalia.

This destruction was not exceptional: not a single building in the neighborhood had survived the bombardment. But I had heard reports that our building was still standing, that Israeli soldiers had used it as a military watchtower, taking advantage of its high elevation, of its two entrances, of its views overlooking the neighborhood in four directions so that its windows could be used by occupation snipers.

*

This isn’t the first home I’ve lost. In December 2023, the family house in which I was born and grew up was destroyed by the Israeli army. But these apartments were the home I had hoped to return to at the end of the war. And although I was extremely sad for the loss of the building, I was most devastated by the loss of my library: the library I had started to build at the age of fifteen, the library that contained all my personal books, manuscripts and papers, along with schoolbooks, university notebooks, and my childhood and adult diaries.

In high school, I used to save my daily pocket money to buy books. The most joyful moment for me was when I saved enough to buy a small horde of books all in one go. I would return home, set the books on the ground, and smell my new collection. I would bring each book to my nose and inhale with excitement.

This habit only grew during my university studies, and through my graduation and employment. When I received my first salary, I spent two thirds of it on books. Even when my library contained thousands of books, every one of them still held a unique story for me. I can remember when I added each volume to the shelf, and why that particular shelf. And I can still smell the books, each one of them with its own fragrance.

While I can buy new copies of many of these lost books, and rebuild the home that housed them, I cannot buy the same books. I cannot attach to the new books the memories and stories I have for the lost ones.

*

There are three precious collections in my library that I will never be able to replace. These are not books, papers, words, lines of verse or stories. These are parts of my life and growth – parts of my memory and my emotional attachments.

The first irreplaceable collection are the books I inherited from my father: books of poetry and old Arabic volumes including One Thousand and One Nights and the Sahil al-Bukhari, the sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. I had asked my dad’s permission to move these treasures from his library to mine. For him, I was the legitimate heir of his small collection. As a child, the 40 or 50 books in his bedroom closet had been my whole universe. From the age of eight I read and reread these books many times. From these books I learned to read and appreciate what I read. From these books I was exposed to the classics of Arabic literature, slowly mastering the language and developing my understanding of rhetoric, imagination, metaphor, rhythm, rhyme, metonymy and narrative.

The second irreplaceable collection are the four huge, blue-covered volumes of my favorite dictionary: al-Qāmus al-Muhīt: a classic of the Arabic language dating to the 14th century. It was the first book my mother bought for me. I was fifteen when she returned in a taxi from the crossing point at the Jordanian border. She pointed to a box in the back of the car and said, “carry your gift.” I was amazed to hold that treasure in my hands. Every day I would open one of the volumes randomly and read whatever page I faced. Each page was a lesson in language, linguistics, literature and history; each entry referenced examples, stories, and texts from the classics.

The third irreplaceable collection is the most personal of all: the handwritten manuscripts of my first four novels. These manuscripts I kept in a special box inside the closet in my library. For more than twenty years they remained here, safe. Alongside these sat other manuscripts, a mixture of typed and handwritten. I still have the tendency to begin my novels with pen on paper, switching to typing only after the first draft. For me these manuscripts were my personal treasures.

All are gone now.

I even developed this hobby of collecting the manuscripts of other authors. In my collections there were handwritten manuscripts by Ghareeb Askalani, Zaki Elalia, Zaid Abu Alula. Some handwritten poems by Ahmad Dabour, Marwan Barzaq and Saleem an-Nafar.

However, for me, the most precious of all the manuscripts in my library were the six stories I wrote in Israeli jail. These were the first stories I ever wrote, penned during a few months of incarceration following my participation in the First Intifada in 1992. I wasn’t quite 19 when I wrote those stories. I “published” them by hanging them on the wall of the prison. Their only readers were my fellow inmates. When I was released, I brought them out with me and kept them as one of my secrets.

Last year I told my Arabic publisher that I was thinking of publishing them properly, “when I turn sixty, maybe.” I do not know why I picked the number 60.

I still remember the plots of these stories. But the stories themselves, like the lives of 50,000 Gazans, have been erased in this war.

In addition to these manuscripts were the books that my fellow authors had signed for me: nearly 400 books, enough to fill two large shelves. I would say that every Gazan author I ever met was represented on those two shelves, copies embellished with special words and sometimes very personal messages. Just looking at these shelves, I used to remember the moments we exchanged, the smiles and the chats that we had. Many of these writers are dead now. The four collections of poetry by Saleem an-Nafar are, like him, under the rubble. Saleem was killed with his wife and children on December 7th, 2023.

*

Mine was not the largest library in the world, but for me it was. Some three thousand books I spent my life gathering.

Looking at the rubble through the images that Mosa, my younger brother, sent me, I tried to imagine the moment of destruction. Did the authors feel the danger before the explosion took place? Did they try to escape?

I imagined the characters in my novels stumbling as the library collapsed around them. They are dead now. I sit and mourn them.

When I was writing my novels, I used to see my characters moving around me in the library. As long as I was writing, they were living with me. And when I finished each novel, I would file the manuscript in the library closet where they’d continue to live.

During the war, I realized my characters were lucky. They did not have to leave the books. They did not have to walk in streets they couldn’t recognize. They did not see the places they lived destroyed. They did not lament their memories like I do when I see images of Gaza and fail to recognize the road on which I was born because everything has been made into heaps of smashed concrete and bricks.

*

It had been my dream to open a public library in my birthplace of Jabalia Camp. My personal library was supposed to be the nucleus or the backbone of this imagined grand project. I grew up in Jabalia without even knowing what a library was; my father’s small closet the only place I could hold a book in my hands. Then, when I was eight years old, my headmaster turned one of the teachers’ rooms into a small library with shelves covering two of its walls. My plan had been to buy a house in the middle of the camp and rebuild it into a full library.

Now the camp is gone, and the books are gone. What is left is only memories and images. But I feel I still have “promises to keep” even if “the woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

*

I am going to miss my desk table made from the beechwood, on which I wrote my novels, plays and articles. When Danial, the carpenter, finished installing it in the library, I took a chisel from his toolbox, sat under the desk, and carved my name along with the date: April 20, 2009. Danial smiled and offered to put his touch on this carving. He asked, “Do you need me to carve a flower?”

I smiled back and asked him to help me shelve the books.

He said, “I’ll shelve the Arabic, and you shelve the English.”

I asked, “Do you know any English authors?”

For him, as expected, it was Shakespeare and “to be or not to be.”

I did not know that I was preparing all this beauty to be “genocided” in a very ugly and brutal way.

Two of Atef Abu Saif’s books are available in English from Comma Press: Don’t Look Left and The Drone Eats with Me. He also edited the short-story anthology The Book of Gaza for Comma Press. You can read an excerpt from his novel Walk Don’t Walk, translated by Alice Guthrie, in the Gaza! Gaza! Gaza! issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Birzeit and a Master’s degree from the University of Bradford. He received a PhD in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of five novels: Shadows in the Memory (1997), The Tale of the Harvest Night (1999), Snowball (2000), The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003, 2006) and A Suspended Life (2014), which was shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF). He has also published two collections of short stories – Everything is Normal (2004) and Still Life: Stories from Gaza Time (2013) – as well as several books on politics. He is a regular contributor to a number of Palestinian and Arabic newspapers and journals. In 2014 Atef edited The Book of Gaza, as part of Comma’s ‘Reading the City’ series, which featured ten short stories by ten contemporary authors from the Strip. In 2015 Atef was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the ‘Arabic Man Booker’. In 2018 he also won the Katari Prize for Best Arabic Novel (young writers category). In 2015 he published his diaries of the 2014 war on Gaza: The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (Comma Press), which was described by Molly Crabapple as ‘a modern classic of war literature’. In 2019, he relocated to the West Bank and became Minister of Culture for the PA. At the start of Israel’s 2023 war on Gaza, Atef was visiting Gaza for a International Heritage Day event with his 15-year-old son, Yasser.