just enough means to rent an apartment in a low-rent part of Beirut, their al-Bassa relations - like other rural refugees - had been obliged by destitution to settle in a camp. Though al-Bassa had been a mixed Christian-Muslim village, the Lebanese government separated out Christian from Muslim refugees, giving the Christians three separate camps -- Dbeyeh, Jisr al-Basha, and Mar Elias -- on land donated by monasteries.² It wasn't until I began staying with Umm Joseph in Dbeyeh camp that I began to understand the actual experience of Palestinian uprooting during the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, and the ways that loss of their land and homeland had ruptured the lives of Palestinian villagers.

Umm Joseph was a younger cousin of my husband's mother, Umm Yusif, the mother-in-law I never knew because she died of a heart attack two years after the Nakba and three years before our marriage (1950). They were both from the village of Al-Bassa in the district of Acre, close to the border between Palestine and Lebanon, demolished by the Israelis after 1948. In spite of sharing a common village and family background, these two Palestinian women had led very different lives. Umm Yusif had gone through secondary school in Sidon - an experience that was highly unusual for girls of her time in villages. After a brief spell of teaching she had married Abdallah Sayigh, a Protestant Syrian pastor who had built a church in Kharaba, in Jebel Druze. Kharaba was a small village with only a single elementary school; Umm Yusif understood that her children were intelligent, and it was largely because of her gentle persistence that this family managed to put all six boys through university, though Abu Yusif's salary as a pastor was a pittance. By 1948, the year of the Nakba, two of the sons had already graduated and were working; one was in the United States studying for a doctorate in Philosophy, and another two were at the American University of Beirut. This was a family

equally far from conspicuous consumption and from destitution.

Umm Joseph on the other hand was illiterate, as were her brothers. Their father, who was one of the mukhtars of al-Bassa, had refused to send any of his children to the village school because it was run by Protestants, while he, like the majority of al-Bassa people, was Greek Catholic. For them, land was everything. Every bit of savings they gleaned from good harvests, or new economic activities -- such as trucking agricultural products -- was put into buying more land. Expelled from al-Bassa in 1948 along with thousands of other Palestinian villagers, they had ended up in Dbeyeh camp, in Lebanon, with nothing.³ The only work they could find was manual or menial -- road building, harvesting, domestic service. The first time I ever met Umm Joseph she was cooking for one of my sisters-in-law. She would come to us too if we had a party, to make 'kibbeh', 'djajj muhammar', or 'moghribiyyeh'. The amount of work required to produce these dishes meant that she would come to us the night before, and get up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning to start preparations. I never heard her express fatigue. At most she'd rearrange her 'mandeel' to catch stray whisps of hair, tucking them in with a brisk gesture.

Umm Joseph was a handsome woman. She tied her graying hair in a 'mandeel' knotted behind her head, in the Greek peasant style that Palestinian Christian village women also used. Her face was deeply etched by work in the sun, and she walked with the stiff roll of arthritis-sufferers. Yet she had a presence and a command over her family that surprised me. I think it was part of her character, and perhaps of Palestinian rural women in general, that she spoke her mind to whomever. Her husband, Abu Joseph, had never worked a day in Lebanon. In al-Bassa he had had owned a coffee-house and a truck as well as his share of land, but in Lebanon, like many other older refugee men, he passed his days with friends, chatting and playing