Ebook: Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman's Memoir

Using unpublished family documents, the memories of friends and acquaintances, and histories of the region and period, Makdisi traces her family's personal story against the backdrop of political events as they take place in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States. The story begins in the 1880's of her grandmother's early childhood in Ottoman Syria; details her mother's experiences of two world wars and their repercussions for the Middle East; and concludes with the author's own experience of raising a family in Beirut, amidst the endless, futile, disillusioning fratricide of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90). This intimate biography reveals the unsung private histories of three extraordinary women--as they work, play and raise families under the most difficult of circumstances.