Haj Taher Kamal was a merchant because his father had been a merchant, and his father before him. Merchants were the glue that bound Nablus to the surrounding villages: for the village people they functioned as credit lines, patrons, employers, even friends; for the city dwellers they were both harbingers of novelty and pillars of tradition, and

He had fallen so easily into the compromise available in Paris, this type, by an embrace of otherness that at first he had admired in Faruq but which now appeared in his mind a skewed, performed version of what it was really like to be in a place but not of it, not to know it truly.

And as the city developed its industries of soap and textiles, this became a common occurrence: the leisure time of the new capitalists expanded as their working hours decreased, and gossip started its ruinous motor into the salons of the wealthy. With such wealth came unhappiness, and with unhappiness intrigue, and the circulation of bitter jokes,

in the winter of 1917, while Hassan was en route to Zawata, the Ottomans lost Jerusalem to the British. Hassan had only reached Jenin when his cousins brought him news that the Turks had retreated to Nablus and were establishing their new stronghold for northern Palestine inside the walls of her old city. Hassan turned back up the road by which he

Marcelin Albert

philology

surfeited

They praised God for the end of the war; they grumbled over the liberties of the British soldiers; they acknowledged the provisions of seed grain and livestock,…

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Travel was again possible between cities; Jerusalem was electrified, and under the new lamps and to the tunes emanating from the shiny phonographs, modern nightlife arrived in the Holy City.