Tales of the Mahjar

Ḥikāyāt al-Mahjar

ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ḥaddād

A complete English translation with an introduction and critical notes

Source text: ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ḥaddād, Ḥikāyāt al-Mahjar (New York: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Tijāriyya al-Amrīkiyya, 1921), as presented in the Hindawi Foundation digital edition (2021).

Translator’s Introduction

Published in New York in 1921, Ḥikāyāt al-Mahjar is an early book-length attempt to make the Arabic-speaking immigrant community in the United States the subject of modern Arabic fiction. Its author, ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ḥaddād (1890–1963), had emigrated from Homs in 1907. Five years later he founded the Arabic newspaper al-Sāʾiḥ (The Traveler), which he edited for decades and which became closely associated with the New York Pen League (al-Rābiṭa al-Qalamiyya).[1] Haddad’s stories grow out of that journalistic world: they are direct, conversational, observant, and repeatedly framed as things the narrator saw, heard, or learned from acquaintances.

The title resists a fully satisfactory one-word English equivalent. Mahjar names both emigration and the place or condition of expatriation; in literary history it also denotes the Arabic literature produced in the Americas by emigrants from the Arabic-speaking provinces of the late Ottoman Empire. This translation therefore retains mahjar in the title while using “diaspora,” “emigration,” “exile,” or “immigrant world” according to context.[2]

Haddad’s “Syrians” are not coterminous with citizens of the present Syrian Arab Republic. In the period represented here, “Syrian” commonly covered emigrants from Ottoman Greater Syria, including people from territories that later became Lebanon as well as modern Syria. The collection’s New York center is the immigrant commercial district around Washington Street, but its characters also travel through the American “interior”—Haddad’s term for places beyond the port metropolis—and appear in Ohio, New England, Florida, and elsewhere.[3] Their most common work is peddling and the wholesale trade that supplied it, an occupational pattern well documented in the history of early Arab immigration.[4]

These are social sketches with a satirist’s eye. Haddad returns to money, credit, status, gendered labor, marriage, education, language, and the immigrant’s divided attachment to “the country” and America. His narrators frequently intrude as witnesses, yet the stories rarely collapse into simple moral verdicts. Their comedy depends on mismatched registers: elevated literary Arabic alongside Levantine speech, Arabicized English and French, Ottoman titles, proverbs, biblical turns of phrase, and deliberate malapropisms. The translation aims to keep that friction audible. Colloquial dialogue is rendered in flexible spoken English without assigning it a modern American regional dialect; conspicuous loanwords and mistranslations are retained or glossed when they carry the joke.

The Arabic base text for this edition is the legally available Hindawi Foundation text and PDF, checked against the publication information of the 1921 New York edition. Hindawi’s contents list comprises Haddad’s preface and thirty-two titled pieces. Paragraphing and parenthetical asides are preserved; punctuation is lightly naturalized for English. Names are given in readable transliteration in the narrative, while the introduction and notes use a simplified scholarly transliteration where helpful. No attempt has been made to conceal the racial, ethnic, gendered, or class language of 1921; where a historical term is liable to mislead a present-day reader, a note supplies context rather than silently rewriting the passage.

Note on the Text and Notes

Footnotes serve four limited purposes: to identify historical people, places, institutions, and titles; to explain proverbs, biblical or literary allusions, and culturally specific practices; to record wordplay or marked Arabic/English code-switching; and to clarify an uncertain or deliberately nonsensical expression. Ordinary foreignness is not annotated. “Translator’s note” is implicit unless a source is named.

Money words require special caution. Haddad often uses riyāl as an immigrant vernacular term for a dollar rather than as the name of a Middle Eastern currency. The translation accordingly gives “dollar” where the American setting makes the referent clear, while notes flag passages in which the wording itself matters.

Contents

Preface

1. The Autocrat
2. In the House of the Dead
3. The Pessimist
4. Simʿān the Votary
5. Clotheslines
6. Nothing to It
7. Money Talks
8. Buried Alive
9. Our Tares, Not Their Wheat
10. The Long-Bearded Man
11. A Son of the Age
12. Khunfushār in America
13. We Have Learning; Fools Have Money
14. Everyone’s Acquaintance
15. The Shortest Way
16. The Two Legalists
17. The Bey’s Misery
18. A Son Out of His Time
19. From the Beginning of the Road
20. The Statue of Liberty
21. From the Bear into the Pit
22. As We Have Become, So Shall You
23. Faith in Humanity
24. American Civilization
25. Tales of Romance
26. No Difference Between the Two
27. May God Bless Him—and Keep Him Away
28. Nature’s Servant
29. Hope and Pain
30. The School of Exile
31. In Second Class
32. By the Sweat of Your Brow

NOTES

[1] Benjamin Smith, “Transitional Portraits: Syrian Immigrants of the North American Mahjar in ʿAbd al-Masih Haddad’s Prose,” Mashriq & Mahjar 7, no. 1 (2020): 27–53, https://doi.org/10.24847/77i2020.247, esp. 27–30. Smith gives Haddad’s birth year as 1890 and records his arrival in New York in 1907 and the founding of al-Sāʾiḥ in 1912.
[2] Arabic mahjar, from the root h-j-r, denotes a place of emigration and, by extension, emigrant or diasporic life. In literary history al-adab al-mahjarī refers especially to Arabic writing produced in North and South America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[3] On the historical scope of “Syrian” and the geography of Haddad’s stories, see Smith, “Transitional Portraits,” 34, 36, 50 n. 1. Smith notes that the term here includes people from modern Lebanon as well as modern Syria.
[4] Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 8, 12, 82, 115; cited and discussed in Smith, “Transitional Portraits,” 36 and 52 nn. 21, 24–25.
