Preface

Ever since I entered America and became immersed in its Syrian world, I have seen forms and conditions in our social life, and many images of our Syrian American existence. I would often ask myself: When will one of our writers finally take up his pen and record these scenes, so that people may study their secrets?

The scenes I mean are visible signs of secrets and outward manifestations of what lies hidden in the soul. I saw them, read them, heard them, and felt them, and I found in them a broad field for any writer who wished to portray Syrian life in the form of the short story.

The thought continued to haunt me until, prompted by an idea that came to mind, I wrote my first story, “Nature’s Servant,” to fill some spare space in the pages of al-Sāʾiḥ.[5] Before I knew it, I found myself driven into the very field I had wanted other writers to enter. No sooner had the story appeared than friends surrounded me and asked how it had occurred to me to compose a tale that was the exact image of a scene from our life in the lands of the mahjar. Then I felt a gentle hand take mine. It was the hand of Kahlil Gibran, dean of the Pen League, and I heard him say: “I want to read a story of this kind by you in every issue of your newspaper. You have no excuse for failing to do the work. Before you lies a broad field into which you have entered. Go deep into its recesses, dive to its floor, and bring us what you find there.”[6]

Some time later he came to persuade me to gather these stories into a separate book, and I could see no avoiding it. What I had heard from this dear friend and from other friends jealous for the honor of our language and literature—friends eager to strip away its garments and robes grown old with time and clothe it in dress suited to this age—had opened ears and eyes within me. Natural inclination led me to do what I had wished someone else would do. I therefore gave imagination free rein in the study of our Syrian life in the mahjar. It watched for one scene after another, which I would then cast in the mold of a short tale, until I had assembled this book. God willing, it may be the prelude to another.

I say the prelude to another because I have found myself captivated by this study. I have realized that I am traveling with a little stream while seeking the waters of the ocean. If in these short tales I have not reached my goal, and have not drawn the scenes that ought to be drawn from the depths of the Syrian soul, then the stream on which I travel will cast me into deeper water, where I may examine Syrian life from its many sides, from the beginning of emigration down to what we have become.

We need a mirror in which to see ourselves, to behold our own appearance with our own eyes and correct its defects. A person resorts to a mirror to arrange his hair and its part and to tie the knot of his necktie; by the mirror of the soul he corrects whatever in his inward appearance needs correction. Upon my life, that moral mirror is nothing other than a story that gives form to one of our customs or traditions, in which the inward eye can see the virtues and vices of our social life.

And so, in pursuit of this desired object—the mirror of the soul—I undertook to write these short tales. I called them Tales of the Mahjar because they concern the mahjar. Perhaps I may do some good through them; if not, the intention is enough for me, and peace be upon them.

ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ḥaddād

New York, 1 April 1921[7]

NOTES

[5] Al-Sāʾiḥ (“The Traveler”) was the Arabic newspaper Haddad founded in New York in 1912. It published major North American mahjar writers and later served as an important organ of the Pen League.
[6] Al-Rābiṭa al-Qalamiyya, usually called the Pen League or Pen Bond in English, was a New York Arabic literary society associated with Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, Nasib Arida, Haddad, and others. The group was reconstituted in 1920. Haddad styles Gibran its ʿamīd, here translated “dean.”
[7] The Arabic gives 1 Nīsān 1921. Nīsān is the Levantine name for April.
