Najati Sidqi’s Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist, translated by Margaret Litvin, Anas Farhan, and Gideon Gordon, is out this month from University of Texas Press.
This sharply satirical short story, published in Sidqi’s 1962 short-story collection of the same name, is a satire that follows the story of a real-life fellow Arab Communist from Haifa who returned from Russia and got rich profiteering off a war-relief charity.
The Millionaire Communist
By Najati Sidqi
Translated by Hadeel Abu Ktaish
(From The Millionaire Communist, 1962)
I was on a plane to Egypt in early January when an investigative journalist sat down next to me. He was a frequent traveler, well read, an expert in people’s stories and temperaments. I noticed him turning toward the back seats when suddenly he grabbed my arm; I thought he was having a dizzy spell, and I almost rang the bell to call for the flight attendant, but he quickly stopped me and as he nodded toward a stocky man looking at the clouds from the window. He asked:
“Do you know that gentleman?”
“Not at all. Who is he?”
“He’s the most amazing man I know. There are conflicting opinions; some say he’s a thief. After all, people are free to label things based on their own backgrounds and outlooks on life.”
My journalist friend went on to tell me about the stocky traveler and said: “His name is Labeeb Iftamian, and I’ve known him for the past thirty years.”
At the time, my friend, I was studying at Moscow University. One day, we were told day that a group of Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi students had come to the Russian capital to learn the authentic teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Among them was Labeeb, this sensible fellow.
When I got to know him, I found him to be an enthusiastic young man, rebellious and raging with passion, always repeating the phrase: “The revolution and the revolutionary are like an unruly horse that leaves nothing behind but dust and rubble.” When I asked him to explain, he traced lines in the air and said: “Dust and rubble are all that’s left from the remains of destruction and wreckage.”
So Labeeb became my friend. We would stroll in the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, watch sports in Dynamo Stadium, go out at night to Red Square and Lenin Hills, or spend late nights at the Bolshoi Theater. He would tell me stories about his party activities in the country he was from, and from what he said he was an expert in throwing propaganda flags on telegraph and telephone wires. He described how he would take a rope and secure the flag on one of its ends. Then he’d tie a rock to the other end and throw it over the wire so it would wrap around it. The flags, which were covered in slogans, would hang in the air like Roman sheets for hours until the fire department and telephone repairman would work together to tear them down.
One day, he told me a story about a machine he’d designed to distribute pamphlets. This machine was a can with no lid secured to a firework. After the can was filled with provocative pamphlets, the person carrying it would light up the rocket and run holding the can high in the air, so it would rain paper onto everyone and their mother.
I also learned he had a special way of slipping out of sight when policemen were chasing him. If, while fleeing, he felt a policeman would catch up to him, he would suddenly throw himself down on the ground and roll left and right, and the policeman would fall onto his face and get roughed up in the dirt, or he would get scratched up and bruised. The young man would then get up and follow the enemy, laughing.
Labeeb told me a lot of things that showed why he was drawn to party politics. One thing he did was distribute pamphlets at night by tossing them onto people through their windows while they were climbing into bed; he would also send protest telegrams under assumed names, arranging groups such as “The Slogan Chanters” and “The Supporter” in public gatherings and celebrations. He mapped out plans to take over unions and clubs through political games and electoral conspiracies, and he’d buy newspaper columns to broadcast one agenda or another.
On this topic, he mentioned something amusing. It was his arrangement with a journalist to publish in a newspaper with a name that wouldn’t raise any suspicion, the point being for this name to deal with provocative issues to pit people against one another in a subtle way. The newspaper would dig up dirt on those who held these matters in their hands with remarkable skill. The journalist pocketed a hundred dinars and disappeared from sight, but then reappeared and said to Labeeb apologetically: “Screw the Devil! I got married with the hundred dinars…”
After this, young Labeeb was in an awkward position with his superiors, as they nearly accused him of “embezzling the party’s money,” telling him he had to pay back the amount in installments from his merchant father’s savings.
In short, Labeeb was very excitable. He was incredibly driven by the party’s teachings, obeying his leaders’ orders, and demonstrating intolerance and a lack of general consideration in debates with anyone who disagreed with him on idea or principle.
So, he came to Moscow to entrench himself in knowledge and strengthen his arguments…
After he had studied political economy and understood the fundamental principles that divide people into groups and social classes, he went from being a lively young man to being a miserable one who thought too much. Some of his colleagues thought he would become more Marxist than Marx. To others, he appeared to believe in a new, profound theory. Meanwhile, a third group imagined he was preparing to be a Red Professor.
In any event, his college years passed, and he returned to his country to turn it upside down.
Sometimes, a person thinks about one thing and ends up achieving the opposite, or he works on something, and the results contradict his work entirely. In reality, a person is in thrall to outcomes, a prisoner of his tangible reality. Abstract fantasy is only an engine and catalyst.
After Labeeb had returned to his country and settled down, the fire in him died down, and his revolutionary activities ceased. He started to think about how he could apply what he’d learned about the principles of political economy for his own personal gain, and he came up with the idea that the satisfaction of a society can only be achieved by satisfying its individuals. Happiness, he decided, could not be unlocked until each individual took it upon themselves to make themselves happy.
The opportunity to realize this idea presented itself at the start of World War II. That’s when he withdrew from the party and began working in an organization that distributed food aid through cards and points.
He was excited to work in this organization, because—in his view—it was the only viable way to tend to the population during the war years. Moreover, it was fertile soil in which to highlight his humanitarian disposition. So, he worked day and night organizing the lists of areas, neighborhoods, and villages, determining the number of individuals in each family and the amount of rice, sugar, oil, and flour to which each was entitled.
Labeeb began his work at the aid agency as a simple employee. After demonstrating skill in his work, competence in his organizing, dedication in his service, and enthusiasm in his aid distribution, he got the promotion he deserved: supervisor, then head of a region.
You would find people constantly repeating his name, encircling him in an aura of admiring appreciation. He wouldn’t receive a single complaint without investigating it, and he would leap to help anyone who came to his door for help. The area he was responsible for had a population of around 50,000, which he had split into eighty centers, appointing three clerks and three workers in each. He authorized each center to take a census of the families and determine the rations required by each.
Overall, he set up an incredibly organized network and his experience in party organizing did not go to waste. Indeed, his education in social services paid off in the most dangerous socio-economic institution known to man in the years of World War II.
The main aid office, in his mind, was the party’s central committee. And the district, the neighborhood, and the village centers for distributing rations were, in his imagination, the local party committee. The consumers, meanwhile, represented the populace of workers, farmers, and poor townspeople.
Previously, he had addressed people through pamphlets, slogans, and incitement. But tomorrow, he would speak to them with points, vouchers, and loaves of bread.
The results were incredible; they achieved widespread recognition and demonstrated overwhelming leadership, as well as something he had neither expected nor ever imagined in his activist career: wealth.
Labeeb remembered, during his studies in Moscow, that Stalin had once said in an address to his people: “Comrades, you must enrich yourselves…”
The late dictator had intended these words to drive workers and peasants to put in effort and increase their pay, so they could become as “rich” as the Soviet system would allow.
The young Labeeb remembered Stalin’s motto and applied it to himself in the best way possible, albeit in circumstances that greatly differed from the ones that had birthed this motto.
And there he was: every month, he would find a number of bags filled with rice, sugar, and flour that hadn’t been distributed, and he would sell them on the black market at unimaginable prices.
Thousands of pounds sterling poured in from all corners. Clients, brokers, and smugglers encircled him, waving bags full of cash. And he wasn’t stingy with the “extra” rations.
Labeeb found no shame in acquiring wealth this way. After all, Stalin had said one day: “Comrades, you must enrich yourselves…”
There was a psychological element that held sway in this young man’s life. He despised capitalism and anything that had to do with it. His hatred was based on an abstract theory, but could he not dabble in this “capitalism” in order to become acquainted with it and explore its depths for himself?
Overnight, he had come to possess 100,000 pounds sterling, while World War II still raged on all fronts.
But don’t think that he had ceased his political life at the start of the war; the process of acquiring wealth could not be resolved without following the political developments in his country and beyond it. He looked forward to hearing an armistice declared, since all he wanted was a happy, quiet life and to enjoy the money he had gathered by providing aid to hundreds of thousands of women and children, as well as the deceased, the wounded, and the maimed.
The newly rich Labeeb transferred the war years’ revenue to a neighboring country and placed it in a bank account under his name. He believed that the 100,000 pounds sterling was a reward for the effort he’d put into managing people’s rations. Fortune—this adventurous, unknown knight—had approached Labeeb to place a gold crown atop his head. A ship called “Stychia,” loaded with foodstuffs, was sent to him precisely on the day armistice was declared. He quickly described himself as a delegate of the public authority for rations and went out in a boat, bringing the ship in as it was still offshore. He asked its crew to empty its cargo into the neighboring country’s port. Those who knew the value of that cargo guessed it to be half a million pounds sterling.
The war’s rich man settled into his new country and established three factories, seven companies, bought three buildings, and financed two banks.
Today, he is a millionaire in the fullest sense of the word: a lofty palace, vast offices, a large number of employees, cars, servants, constant travel between Europe and America, a life full of vanity and enjoyment, and nothing to bother or stress him except the link between the beginning and the end.
Labeeb the businessman, with all the wealth he had attained, continued to mention Karl Marx in approving tones and to give him credit, all while he disagreed with him on the concept of “surplus value.”
My journalist friend stopped telling the story of Labeeb Iftamian once the plane had landed at Cairo Airport. We headed toward passport control, and the entire time I was looking at the exceptional communist millionaire with great curiosity. The capitalists that hit rock bottom are countless, while communists who rise to the rank of capitalists are rarer than gold extracted from mercury…
Najati Sidqi was a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. Read an excerpt of his newly translated Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist at Jewish Currents.
Hadeel Abu Ktaish lives in NYC, working at the UN and attending law school part-time. She enjoys reading and critiquing books on her Goodreads page during her free time.
Also read:
Lutka and Najati: Love and Communism in British Mandate Palestine, by Yair Wallach
Order The Memoir of Najati Sidqi (Arabic), edited by Hanna Abu Hanna (IPS, 2001).
Not Monolithic, by Sana Tannoury-Karam