“Filling in the Blanks”: Jaffa's Oranges, an English Suit, and the Rememorying of Palestinian History

Abstract

Like great port cities throughout history, Jaffa has always welcomed strangers; enough of them to earn its sobriquet “mother of strangers” (umm al-gharīb). The gateway to Palestine and the Levant since ancient times, Jaffa is not only the site of multiple events of biblical or broader religious significance. With the incorporation of Palestine in the late 18th century into the still developing modern world system, Jaffa became a city of culture and commerce, with winding casbahs and tree-lined boulevards, Turkish baths and Jewish bordellos, sand dunes and orange orchards—lots of them, as we'll see—and some of the most striking architecture, never mind coastline, of the Eastern Mediterranean. North African Jews, Haurani Bedouins, Afghan traders, rabbis from Beirut, troubadours from Jerusalem, divas from Mansoura, and more than a few European Christian and Jewish pilgrims, all made their way to and through Jaffa over the centuries, joining a local population that septupled to over 17,000 during the course of the 19th century. They were joined by tens of thousands of Jews for whom Jaffa was a port of entry to Palestine with the onset of Zionist colonization. Jaffa, in other words, is the perfect locale for a novel, especially when, as with award-winning architect and writer Suad Amiry's first novel, Mother of Strangers, most of it happens to be rooted in truth.