Seven Letters to Umm Kulthum
By Ala Hlehel
Translated by Peter Theroux
Seven Letters to Umm Kulthum follows the story of a Palestinian family from a small, remote village in the Upper Galilee: the parents, Mustafa and Hajer, and their sons, Yazn and Nur. The events of the novel begin on December 8, 1987, when the first Palestinian intifada begins. The first Arabic edition was published in June 2023 and won the prestigious 2024 Katara Award for Published Novels.
Tomorrow, an interview with Hlehel, and — publishers note — you can find out more in our April 2025 newsletter for publishing professionals.
Act One:
Spring in Winter
1
Nur reached his arm deep into the burrow until it disappeared up to his shoulder. He shoved his arm down the burrow as the right side of his body lay along the dirt and fresh, damp green grass, then lay down fully on the ground so that his green wool sweater seemed like an organic part of the broad green meadow which was marked all down its length by a wide network of dark brown earthen lumps—no one but a blind mole knew who had strewn them upon the earth with such precision and order.
Who’ll remember this beautiful moment fifty years from now? Hajer wondered with a smile as she carried her huge laundry basket toward the back vegetable garden where the laundry line was stretched tautly between the iron arbor trellis post and the sumac tree which shaded the end of the house, with white sheets and pillowcases flapping high and dipping like the sails of a becalmed ship sailing nowhere in particular. Two children played in the yard, hunting a poor mole that was only trying to provide for his offspring. Scattered clouds, white and gray, came and went briskly, as if they were chasing the cold December winds rather than being pushed by them.
Yazn stood by Nur, his eyes wide with fear: “What are you doing? Dad told us not to catch moles!” But Nur paid no attention to him. Yazn raised his head and looked around, searching worriedly. He saw the nearby house and his mother gazing at him with a smile as she collected the large white pillowcases from the long laundry line. His gaze roved farther in search of his father, then remembered that he was still at work, and relaxed a little. He looked at Nur, who was hugging the earth ever more tightly, sunk nearly up to his shoulder in the hole. He smiled at this funny sight.
“You caught him?”
“No.”
Nur’s voice came out somewhat muffled, panting and testy. Yazn approached Nur, knelt beside him, and placed his head closer to the ground. He lay his ear to the ground and closed his eyes, listening for something. But Nur’s panting was stronger than the mole’s underground movements. The two seemed helpless in the face of events when they heard their mother’s voice coming from where she stood unfolding the laundry: “There it is!”
The brothers jumped to their feet and looked with joy in the direction their mother was pointing. For a moment, they saw the ground move in one of the lumps and began to run toward that distant hole. The two were swift and deft, but the mole plunged into his burrow, vanishing in the blink of an eye. Disappointed, the two stood over the burrow looking over the damp, muddy opening; it seemed that they had nothing ingenious enough to get the mole out of it. Suddenly, Nur raced toward the wooden shed by the house at top speed and disappeared into it. Yazn was baffled. He looked over at his mother, who was taking down the white pillowcases and looking on with a smile. Nur came back at a run, holding a large brown piece of paper in one hand—part of a cement bag—and a box of matches in his other hand.
“We’ll light the paper and the smoke the mole out of there,” Nur panted. Without waiting a moment, he lit the big brown sheet and placed its flaming side at the opening of the burrow. The two waited for the smoke to rise from it. When it smoked, Nur ripped off a piece of the big sheet and handed it to Yazn, telling him firmly, “Blow on it to make the smoke go in.” Yazn knelt at the burrow’s opening with the burning paper in his hand, then blew on it and the fire went out. But a dense cloud of thick white smoke emerged and began to seep inside the burrow’s opening. Yazn felt that this was a moment of genius, and when he saw Nur at a distance, kneeling and blowing the smoke into the hole below, he felt that the plan would be a huge success. He could not contain himself.
“Nur! What do we have to do to catch him?”
“Look!”
Nur’s response did nothing to hinder Yazn’s determination; the important thing was that the two of them would catch this stubborn mole. He had never touched a mole before. It did not seem fair to him to live here, among so much nature, without ever having touched a mole. Yazn began to scan the vast green meadow, where the small scattered brown lumps looked like smallpox as Nur blew hard on the flaming paper. Suddenly the mole popped out of the nearby hole between them and started to rush toward the huge oak tree that stood on the hill that bore its name. The two raced after the mole, laughing loudly, but when they heard a voice, they froze in place.
“Nur! Yazn!”
The two started with fright as they looked over at the source of the voice, realizing that it was their father’s. They stood unmoving as Mustafa approached them, briskly and angrily. The two boys knew what would happen. Mustafa raised his hand and struck Yazn’s face hard, then struck Nur’s face. Yazn’s tears flowed immediately while Nur only held his cheek and gazed at his father with hatred.
Hajer hurried to her sons. Before she got there, Mustafa shouted, “Hajer! What are you doing? Are you watching them?”
She did not answer him. She hugged Nur affectionately and wiped away the tears from Yazn’s face. Mustafa lit a cigarette nervously and glared at her with hate.
“It seems like the big man coming home from Germany scrambled your brains.”
Hajer stared intently at Mustafa’s face. The astonishment in her expression was genuine and shocking. Mustafa knew at that moment that she had not been aware of Jamal’s return from abroad. She got up quickly, picked up the heaping laundry basket, and went back into the house. Mustafa was fuming with rage.
“And now you two. How many times have I told you?” he demanded angrily, his eyes bugging out as he stamped out the still smoking piece of cement-bag paper with his heavy boot. Neither boy answered him.
Mustafa moved angrily toward the house and went in, slamming the door behind him.
Yazn felt the cold December wind burning the tears that streamed down his cheeks and did not look at Nur, who still clutched his aching cheek and watched as he growled with suppressed anger. But Yazn saw no sign of any tears in Nur’s eyes.
From inside the house came the muffled sound of their father’s shouting. Both knew that he was shouting at their mother, who had to have been sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her hands in silence. Nur turned around and ran toward the village while Yazn began to walk slowly toward the oak at the top of the hill. He would sit under the giant oak and his tears would quickly dry as he gazed at the village’s houses spreading out before his eyes. And he would forget.
2
Yazn dearly loved the roof of their house. Theirs was the last one on the northwest side, more than three hundred meters from the first. Mustafa was always telling them, on every possible occasion, that they were all extremely fortunate that his great grandfather had bought this lot, relatively far from the village, back in the days of the English Mandate, for a paltry price. After the establishment of Israel, his father—their grandfather—succeeded in convincing the military ruler to allow him to construct a house on this remote lot abutting Tel al-Baluta, or Oak Tree Hill. No one knew that the grandfather told the military ruler at the time to persuade him, but, back then, a mass of whispers dominated the nightly village gossip for long months. After his parents’ death, the family decided to grant Mustafa this lot, the house, and the quarry in return for his relinquishing his share of the dunums of cherry trees at the top of the mountain, which his two brothers cultivated all year long. And so Mustafa found himself the owner of a beautiful house amid captivating nature, far from people’s eyes and tongues—exactly as he preferred. In the rare moments he felt flooded with happiness or some kind of contentment, he would take Nur and Yazn to stroll with him up to the oak at the very top of the hill. On one rare occasion, he even permitted himself to sit on the swing he had built for his sons, with all three displaying confused but excited smiles. This was a strange and even jarring activity compared to what the two boys expected from Mustafa, given his extremely harsh parenting, especially as they were used to the sight of their mother Hajer swinging high with her eyes closed, enjoying the slight dizziness that came along with it, easing the ropes of the swing that took her higher and higher, so that the broad green plain between the hill and the village houses was spread out in front of her as she sung an Umm Kulthum song at the top of her voice.
“You had with me
The most beautiful story
In my life”
In these moments Nur and Yazn felt a strange magic, as if this were an imaginary scene from a black-and-white Egyptian movie, not something happening right in front of them for real, especially when Hajer revealed her sublime talent for swinging high.
“Bring me your eyes where mine can daydream … “
Yazn stood on the roof of the house scanning the horizon in every direction with immense pleasure. To the west lay the village cemetery and to the north the little hill where the huge, ancient oak tree grew. The people of the village called their house Bait al-Baluta, Oak Tree House, and Yazn took great pride in this name. He felt that their house took on a special importance by its proximity to this giant tree. It was the same feeling of specialness and uniqueness Nur had talked about the previous year, when he enjoyed the honor of sitting next to their teacher in the front seat of the bus that took the class on an unforgettable pleasure trip to Lake Tiberias.
When Yazn stood on the roof of the house, he felt that he was master over something; he did not know what it was, and he could not define it in fixed words, but he felt that he owned a home. “I feel like I own a house when I stand on the roof,” he told his mother Hajer once at the onset of last year’s winter, when she was gathering piles of cotton spread out on the roof, taking advantage of a clear sunny midday. Hajer smiled. “But you do have a house.”
“I know, I know,” Yazn replied quickly, and when he saw that these words would not help him, he looked rapidly toward the village that was spread out, languorous and calm, between the two high, opposing hills. It seemed that its houses had dropped there like scattered drops of rain from a passing cloud, one house after the other, huge drop after huge drop, from the top of the northern hill and to the top of the southern hill, thereby weaving a carpet freckled with spacious rural houses surrounded by trees on every side. The sight of burning smoke rising from the thick metal pipes or from the old chimneys roused in Yazn mixed emotions of profound safety and the cold shudder that pierced his entire body. As if his body heeded the conspicuous contradiction in the image displayed before him: this December chill stinging his remote mountain village which had lost now to the flaming wood in the stoves inside the houses immersed in an intimate, cozy slumber, the fragrance of firewood mingled with the ubiquitous smell of lentil soup. He loved the houses of the northern hill more than the hill opposite. In their conversations about the history of the village and the country, his mother told him that the houses of the “north” were ancient and built of patterned tabza stone; they were the village’s historic houses which had not been demolished in the Nakba, but constructed on the opposite southern hill houses for the refugees who had fled to the village after the Zionist forces had demolished their villages and expelled them form them . . . houses made of concrete and cement, confined and painted, lacking the authenticity that comes only with ancient, overcrowded neighborhoods whose narrow streets and lanes wound around its plazas and buildings; he saw them now winding in their diverging intersections like lines on the palm of one’s hand; he saw them from his place mingled with the dense trellised bushes with their bare and sleeping brown trunks like the fingers of an underground being emerging from underneath the houses to enclose them firmly and gentle at the same time. He loved the idea that some huge mythical being was sleeping underneath the village houses, and that he awakened now and then, turning from side to side, causing disasters or violent fits of anger, annihilating a house or several houses. Exactly like what happened when his father got angry.
Yazn remembered Nur asked, “What does Nakba mean?” when Hajer had told them for the first time about the village’s history three or four years ago. The three of them were walking home from Hajer’s parents’ house, and Hajer shared a few sporadic words and sentences about this alley, or that tree, or that house which had belonged to the village headman, and into which fugitives from the neighboring village of Safsaf had disappeared when Safsaf was destroyed and more than fifty of its people had been killed. When Nur asked her about Safsaf and the Nakba, Hajer stopped walking and looked out at the level green plain before them to the east and pointed. “Do you see the big stone houses surrounded by cactus? Belonging to the Shereidis?” The two boys looked closely and after a few moments looked at each other, mystified. “No, we don’t see anything.” Hajer nodded, patted Yazn tenderly on the head, and said, “That’s the Nakba.”
Yazn did not remember when the Abu Marun family had installed a red tile roof on their house, but the red roof gleamed promiscuously amid the roofs of the village houses on the north hill, most of which were coated with the cool black that protected the ancient houses from the dampness of the rain which seeped into the stones and the people alike. The schoolchildren talked of the tile roof, the very first in the village. Abu Marun’s nephew said that his uncle worked in the Tel Aviv area with the Jews building houses for them, and that there he had learned how to install a tile roof over the balcony in his house. Could tile be what it was missing? No, no, he did not like this kind of roof imported from “there,” from the Jews, and he saw it as an ugly blemish spoiling what he loved to see when he contemplated the houses of the northern hill which had escaped demolition. An ugly tile roof that Yazn knew deep in his heart was the first but would not be the last. Yazn remembered that his mother’s reply had been correct, but he had still not been convinced. Why did he feel that he owned a real house when he was on the roof, exploring with his eyes the edges of the village, guessing what each one of his classmates was doing in his house right now.
“What, are you daydreaming?” asked Mustafa, scolding Yazn who was contemplating the roofs of the houses. Yazn quickly repaid attention and went back to focusing with his father and gripped the wooden ladder tightly as Mustafa stood on the top rung, leaning to the high iron pipe, trying to adjust the big aerial pointed to the north, toward Lebanon.
“Anything?” Mustafa shouted loudly, directing his question downward, to where Hajer was supposed to be standing at the window beneath him, watching the television on high alert. She had a guilty feeling because the new television was unable to receive any of the available channels, most importantly from Jordan, Syria, and the Saad Haddad channel belonging to the South Lebanon Army. Hajer sensed that Mustafa’s anger was rising when he asked her very loudly, “Well?!” and she had to answer hesitantly, “Not yet.”
Yazn felt a sudden jolt as Mustafa grabbed the aerial angrily and twisted it in one movement toward the east, bellowing, “What’s the use buying a color television that can’t bring in a single station?”
“It’s coming! It’s here!” Hajer called from below, and her head outside the window turned upward, looking very happy.
“The Saad Haddad channel?”
“No, Jordan.”
“What do I want with Jordan?! Jordan’s no good,” Mustafa answered angrily, pointing the aerial in the opposite direction, starting to shake it as if shaking the branch of an olive tree and shouting wrathfully, “Maybe this way we can bring in Germany!”
It was now four thirty. The Jordanian channel’s Quran recitation and Hadith were over, and now an episode of The Smurfs would have started. Yazn loved Grouchy Smurf and the schemes of Jokey Smurf. He felt like Jokey Smurf filled him with delight and solidarity, and that his schemes and misfortunes made the world happier, exactly as Nur did with his cheerfulness and schemes, even if they made their father angry. He looked around him on the roof, then around the house, but he did not see him.
“It’s here,” Hajer called from below. “We’re getting Saad Haddad!”
Mustafa nodded contentedly and began to tighten the screw, fixing the aerial tightly in place. When he went into the house with Yazn, he found a pot of fresh coffee on the kitchen table, but he headed straight for the television. It was a Phillips model, its prominent curved screen occupying most of the set; to the upper right were twelve controls for changing the channel, and underneath was a concealed box with several black buttons, which could be opened with pressure on the cover, sustained pressure, and below it was a wide control that moved sideways to adjust the volume. Under all that were speakers that were hidden beneath a long perforated piece of plastic down to the bottom. It seemed to Mustafa rather complicated when he tried to adjust the color of the picture that was now too vivid. Kermit the Frog was talking to Miss Piggy, who was always sparring with Kermit to express her love for him. Yazn tried to steal a glance from behind his father’s back as he crouched before the screen, pressing the buttons. Suddenly the picture turned black and white, and Yazn was afraid. “The color’s gone.”
“I know!” Mustafa replied testily, giving Yazn his furious, penetrating glare. Yazn took an automatic step backward, feeling Hajer’s hand seizing his shoulder and gently pulling him backward as she whispered, “Come eat some holiday pastries your grandmother made.”
Mustafa turned the color control button in the opposite direction and the color returned to the screen and, even though he was confused and afraid, Yazn felt an overwhelming joy at the return of green Kermit. This green seemed to him ripe and bright and full of life. Then the horizontal “lines” started, the static that shook the screen until the picture stabilized and became attractive again. Mustafa sat on the chair beside the kitchen table and took a big gulp from the white coffee mug and lit a long Broadway cigarette. The three of them were dazzled by the sight, and it seemed they were enjoying these first moments of intense focus, with an overpowering wish to immortalize it in their memories as much as they possibly could.
“Color television!” Nur shouted, entering the house and rushing toward the new appliance. Without anyone realizing what was happening, he pressed the 1 on the menu of channels, so the picture switched to the news bulletin on the Israel channel.
“Are you trying to drive me crazy, boy? Are you trying to wreck the television we just hooked up?” Mustafa asked with mounting anger.
“I only changed the channel, who wrecked anything?”
Mustafa didn’t answer. Yazn shrank back into his place and put a piece of yellow bread he had not finished on the table. He began to slink stealthily toward the bedroom. Hajer realized where this situation might be headed, so she immediately got up, went to Nur, and took his hand.
“Come, my dear. Did you finish your math homework?”
“I hate math! I want to watch the color television,” Nur said in annoyance as he walked with his mother toward the bedroom he shared with Yazn, and the three of them disappeared inside.
Mustafa sat, smoking in silence, staring at the screen which was broadcasting scenes of the clashes between Israeli Army soldiers and dozens of youths in Gaza who had been throwing stones, burning tires and blocking streets with barrels and boulders. It was the first time he was seeing the streets of Gaza in color. Then he slowly began to hear what the Israeli announcer was saying in Hebrew about the dead and wounded, about a traffic accident involving a truck three days ago which had ignited demonstrations which were growing and growing, spreading from Gaza to the West Bank. Mustafa lit another cigarette and sensed that something big, something momentous, was on the verge of happening.
Ala Hlehel is the author of the novels Seven Letters of Umm Kulthum (2023), Au Revoir Akka (2014) and The Circus (2001),the short story collections My Secret Affair with Carla Bruni (2012) and Stories for Times of Need (2003), and the novella and short story collection The Father, the Son, and the Wandering Ghost (2008). He was awarded The Ghassan Kunafani Short Story Prize (Palestinian State Prizes, 2013) and is a three-time awardee of the A M Qattan Foundation Award (2005, 2003, 2001), among other honors, including the 2024 Katara Award. Hlelel has a BA in mass media and fine art from the University of Haifa, and is a graduate of the School of Screenwriting. He has worked for many years as a press, radio, and internet journalist, and is Editor in Chief of the cultural website qadita.net.
Peter Theroux is the translator of a dozen books from Arabic, including Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley, and Emile Habiby’s Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter, A Palestinian Fairy Tale.