Photograph by Aaron F. Stone, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the late seventies, my grandfather left Nablus and took a job as head surgeon at a hospital in Grundy, Virginia, a coal-mining town tucked between Kentucky and West Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains. Grundy is the rural county seat of Buchanan County and home to Buchanan Mine, the deepest operating longwall coal mine in the United States. Neil Armstrong was rumored to have visited and signed the guest book, after the miners disputed Armstrong’s claim that he was the first man to walk where no man had ever set foot. They did that every day, the miners said.

Grundy was, and still is, green in landscape and politically red. Back then, it had a population of 1,100—a number that has since dropped to 875. There was no Walmart, or even Kmart, but an A-Mart. There was no McDonald’s, but a Hardee’s and a Long John Silver’s. No Burger King but a Burger Queen, and a Dairy Queen; no Sears but a Ben Franklin five-and-dime. The nicest shop, where my grandmother hung out, was a boutique called Town ’n Tweed. According to my uncle Ammar, who spent the entirety of his high school years in Grundy, there were two Black students and one Hispanic student at the private Mountain Mission School—Ammar went to the public school and was the only kid there with an accent. There were four nonwhite doctors in town: a Lebanese doctor, two Indian doctors, and my grandfather.

Before moving to Grundy, my grandfather—or Sido, as we called him—had been the head of Watani Hospital in Nablus and chairman of the Red Crescent Society, providing healthcare and social services. He was a UVA and Sloan Kettering–trained doctor who, over his lifetime, collected specialties in oncology, reconstructive surgery, and obstetrics. In 1977, my grandfather arrived in Central Virginia to drop off his oldest son, Saad, at college in the town of Colonial Heights, known colloquially as Colonial Whites. Saad remembers encountering all sorts of racial slurs there, even though those lobbing them had no idea where Palestine was, or even that Saad was Palestinian. My grandfather stayed with Saad until he’d settled in. But instead of returning to Nablus, he started to look for jobs in the area. He found one at a military base in Fort Lee, Virginia, outside the Civil War town of Petersburg on the Appomattox River. To make more money, he took a second job moonlighting at a hospital in Emporia on the North Carolina border, forty-five minutes away.

Eventually he began searching for a permanent job. He and Saad would drive around in a gas-guzzling car until it ran on fumes—they were in blue law territory, so stations were closed on weekends—my grandfather interviewing at hospitals as the higher-ups wined and dined the two of them. He initially decided on a position in Richlands, a middle-class suburb farther southwest in Tazewell County. Driving there once to visit him, Saad passed through a boarded up, overgrown town and thought, Who would live in this place? 

That place turned out to be Grundy, Virginia, and it turned out his father was moving there in the coming month. A new hospital had just opened, Buchanan General, built high up in the mountains so it wouldn’t flood like the last one had two years earlier. They needed doctors to treat the miners. Thanks to the late-seventies coal-mining boom, miners were making decent money and had unionized, meaning they had good health-care coverage. My grandfather would head the surgery ward of the new hospital in exchange for a guaranteed salary of six thousand dollars a month, and more if he saw patients outside the clinic. 

Throughout these two years of job searching, my grandmother—we called her Tata—was back in Nablus with her two youngest, Lina and Ammar. My mother was in college in Jordan. Sami, the middle son, was finishing high school in Cairo after his parents sent him there to keep him out of Israeli prisons for demonstrating against the occupation. My grandfather wanted my grandmother to wait for him to be fully established before joining him in Grundy, and for both my mother and Lina to have graduated. Still, my grandmother was impatient. She had lived happily in New York City with my grandfather twenty years earlier, during his residency at Sloan Kettering. She was excited about the prospect of returning to America. But to her, America meant Manhattan.

On September 11, 1979, my grandmother arrived in Washington, D.C., with twenty-one-year-old Randa and eighteen-year-old Lina, and Ammar, age twelve, who’d just finished seventh grade. The four of them spent two days in D.C., at her brother’s house, until my grandfather arrived in his giant car to pick them up and take them down to Grundy. But first, he took them to McDonald’s. “I don’t remember if I had a burger,” Ammar told me. “But I do remember eating a hot fudge sundae. I was sold.”

It took two days for them to arrive in Grundy. Along the way, they stopped to visit Saad, who had transferred to UVA. That night they stayed in a Holiday Inn half an hour outside of Charlottesville, overlooking the Blue Ridge Parkway. Ammar remembers the hotel pool, the cool September breeze. The next day they set out to Grundy, still six hours away. As they got further west and deeper south, driving past Roanoke, and then Blacksburg, my grandmother became increasingly worried. Where were the cafés? The yellow cabs? Where was Bloomingdale’s? By the time they drove through Richlands, the town where my grandfather was working and temporarily living, staying with a Lebanese doctor and his family whom he had met while working there, she was fully panicked.

“The fact that she didn’t like the town that was better than Grundy didn’t bode well,” Saad said. Richlands at least had a strip mall with a Baskin-Robbins, a movie theater, and a McDonald’s. When Tata finally got to the Anchor Inn in Grundy, where they’d stay for one week until moving into a four-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath house that my grandfather had bought for eighteen thousand dollars, she called Saad crying.

“Why didn’t you tell me,” she wailed, “that it was like this?!” The truth is that Saad tried to warn my grandmother before she’d got there that Grundy was nothing like New York City. Both he and my grandfather tried, but she’d refused to hear it. 

Grundy, Virginia, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0,

Grundy has been in the ether of my life for as long as I can remember, in spite of the fact that I’ve never actually been there. I’ve primarily known it as the place where my grandfather lived, a seven-hour drive from our house in McLean. Sometimes he’d come to visit. Once he brought me a cat, which we named Lou, who lived with us for nearly fifteen years. 

During Sido’s visits, he’d sit in our formal living room and read medical journals, a habit that garnered him the nickname the Intellectual, a label later applied to anyone in my family who liked reading. My cousins Tamara, Hisham, and I were all lumped together as “the intellectuals.” We were all “just like Sido.” But of the three of us, I was the only one who remembered him. He died in 1993, when I was in the sixth grade. Plus, Sido was always overshadowed by my grandmother. Our beloved, self-sacrificing Tata, who left Grundy and came to D.C. when I was two years old and my brother a newborn—never mind that her youngest son, Ammar, was still in high school back in Grundy—and whose life revolved around us, her grandchildren.

“It’s not like she went to Harvard,” Aunty Lina would quip. “What else did she have to do?”

She wasn’t educated past high school, but Tata often doled out medical advice and handed out Tylenol like they were mints. “Want some?” she’d offer, though no one had complained of a headache. “Fadaleh, Doctorah Fatmeh,” Sido would say, rolling his eyes as she proceeded to offer up her own diagnoses and accompanying medications.

Sido, on the other hand, was a prodigy. When his father died, they opened up his closet and found that he’d kept all of his son’s exam books, all marked with perfect scores. Sido grew up in Palestine during the years of the British mandate. After finishing primary school in Nablus, he was chosen to study at the prestigious Rashidiya Secondary School for Boys in East Jerusalem, established in the late Ottoman Empire. Midway through the first year, the school sent his tuition back and offered him a full scholarship. He was accepted to the American University of Beirut to study medicine, and again his tuition was returned in exchange for a full ride. 

After he graduated, he took a job in Dhahran, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where Aramco is headquartered, working as the doctor for the eventual crown prince Fahd. A party boy back then, Fahd would apparently cough up fake blood so that my grandfather would sign him off to leave the country. The Saudis liked Sido so much they offered him honorary Saudi citizenship, the equivalent of gold. He could’ve stayed there and worked a cushy job, made tons of money, and claimed Saudi citizenship and scholarships for all his future children.

“No one with that gig would leave it,” his sister Amto Fikrat said. Except for Sido. He couldn’t be bothered by Saudi citizenship. What he wanted was more education. He wanted to specialize. And the best place for that happened to be America.

*** 

Sido arrived in Charlottesville in the summer of 1954, where he completed a surgery residency at UVA hospital, then immediately to New York for a surgical oncology residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering. On a trip home to Nablus in between, he met my grandmother. He was initially interested in her sister, Nehaya. They had a lot in common: Nehaya was educated and she loved science and reading. But she was already engaged, and so her parents offered him Fatima instead.

Had my grandmother grown up in a culture where arts flourished, she would’ve thrived. But when it came to her studies, she was the opposite of my grandfather. Her parents also sent her to school in Jerusalem, to the Schmidt School for Girls. She was sent back home for hiding in the nuns’ quarters. She claimed that she wanted to see what their hair looked like underneath their habits. She didn’t go to college; she had no interest in academics. What she loved, though, was music. Throughout her life, even in dementia, she played the piano beautifully. And she danced. Anytime I pulled up an old Fairuz song on YouTube, she would spring to life like one of those dancing sunglassed flowers from the eighties. She was always the last to leave the dance floor at weddings, no matter how well she knew the bride and groom. 

By all accounts, including those of their children, my grandfather adored my grandmother, despite the apparent mismatch. And she loved him, too. Some mornings when I’d visit her after his death, she’d tell me she’d dreamt about “making sex” with Sido, cackling with a naughty laugh. I have a black-and-white photo of them taken in their Upper East Side apartment, where they lived during the Sloan Kettering residency. They’re facing each other in the kitchen, my grandfather wearing slacks and suspenders and holding a dish towel, my grandmother standing in front of him in a long dress, holding a pot. They’re both wearing aprons. Behind them is a box of Tide detergent on the shelves, a stainless-steel tea kettle on the stove. The linoleum flooring curls along the edges of the room. They look immensely happy, and immensely American.

Maybe that’s what led them to return to Nablus after three years: fear of becoming too American, and of raising American children. They had two kids while they were in New York. My grandmother spent most of her days walking Manhattan streets with her newborn son, Saad, in his fancy frilly stroller, her toddler Randa trotting along beside them as they hopped from shop to shop, playground to playground. Randa was learning to speak, but mostly English, which worried my grandfather so much that it motivated him to move back overseas. Besides, my grandmother loved the city, but living there was increasingly difficult. By the time they returned home, in 1960, my mother was two and a half, Saad was one, and a third child was on the way.

***

Anytime I ask about Sido’s return to Nablus, his closest relatives lament his decision. A wasted talent, they say. Practicing medicine in Nablus had its frustrations and limitations. In the hospital, patients would smoke. There would be twelve or so more visitors than allowed in a room at any one time, and usually outside of designated visiting hours. He allowed no one special favors or exceptions, contradicting the tradition of nepotism known as wastaa that governs Arab relations. Even Sido’s father-in-law, a powerful and prominent man in Nablus, the first Palestinian speaker of the Jordanian House of Representatives, had to wait outside the hospital until he was called in by his son-in-law. At the same time, he also refused to see any other doctor.

Sido had been practicing medicine back in Nablus for nearly seven years by the time the Six-Day War started in June of 1967. By then, he and Tata had five kids, including a six-month-old baby boy, Ammar. On the first day of the war, a Jordanian tank came to their house to pick Sido up to take him to the battlefield to be a medic. Sido brought my grandmother and their children to his in-laws’ house in the center of Nablus, where they sheltered in the basement along with several aunts and uncles, listening to the radio updates falsely informing them that the Arab armies were winning. But Sido, who was out in the field operating, knew this wasn’t true and that they were losing the war. He even told the Jordanian soldiers to go home, but they wouldn’t, and instead many of them were killed.

On the sixth day, when the Israelis came to my great-grandparents’ house to tell them to surrender, everyone who’d been sheltering came outside, thinking it was the Arab armies announcing victory. My great-grandfather wept. At the end of just six days, Israel had taken control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

In 1969, two years after the Israelis took Nablus, Sido went to Amman and worked with the PLO as a doctor. The plan was for his family to join him there, and they’d sold all their stuff in Nablus for the move. But in 1970, a civil war broke out between the Jordanian army and the PLO. The PLO lost and was exiled to Lebanon. Though Sido initially followed them there, he soon realized that the same thing that happened to the PLO in Jordan would happen in Lebanon (he was right, and the PLO was exiled once again, its leader exiled to Tunisia). And so Sido stayed in the country only a short time before returning to Nablus.

For most Palestinians, five years spent working with the PLO meant five years in an Israeli prison. But since Sido was a reputable doctor, the Israelis let him work in a rural hospital in Tulkarem, in the West Bank, instead. Two years later they appointed him president of the Watani Hospital in Nablus. Once, the Israeli minister of health came to visit the hospital with a TV crew to publicize how good Israel had been to Palestinians. The place was in great shape, thanks to my grandfather, who, with his American training and specializations, knew how to run a medical facility. On live television, the health minister asked Sido why Palestinians didn’t trust them, especially after all that Israel had done for them. In addition to being structured and demanding, Sido was also honest to a fault. “I’m an unarmed doctor,” he responded, “and you’re here with two armed soldiers. Who trusts who?”

Sido then on to tell the minister that they’d done nothing for the Palestinians. There had been three hospitals in the city, and when the Israelis invaded, they robbed two of them and took all the equipment, then turned them into jails. After the interview, my grandfather was removed from his position. But instead of exiling him, which he’d feared, the Israeli Ministry of Health reopened one of the hospitals.

Alongside all this, my grandfather’s middle son, Sami, was becoming increasingly politically active in resisting the occupation. He was in and out of jail eighteen times. My grandparents knew they had to get him out of Nablus before he ended up getting himself killed. And so they sent him to Cairo to finish high school. He would only return to Nablus years later, when he himself was a father. He got out at the right time. Most of the friends he threw stones and organized protests with ended up dead or languishing in prisons for years. Without his position as head of the hospital in Nablus, Sido wasn’t making enough money to support his family. And with the economic strangulation, there were far fewer jobs. The strains of life under occupation were increasingly felt: the restrictions on movement, the ominous checkpoints and military jeeps on the edges of town, the sight of armed soldiers, encroaching land seizures. One of Sido’s five kids was now in Cairo; another, my mother, had just started university in Jordan. Sido later admitted that he didn’t want Ammar to go down the path of political resistance. When Saad got into college in Virginia, Sido decided to go with him and look for work there, in the hopes of relocating his family, and offering a better future to their youngest.

But first, he tried to get his tabaye from Saudi Arabia, the citizenship he and his family had been offered over twenty years prior, realizing what he’d given up and how much that would help them now, stateless, and with opportunities dwindling. The situation in the West Bank had become much worse than anyone could’ve imagined. But it was too late.

***

In a way, Grundy has always been less a place where Sido lived and treated patients than a source of family lore. It’s the site of my uncle Ammar’s high school years, where he first saw snow and dated his first girlfriend, the reason the youngest of my mother’s four siblings is the anomaly and the most American of them. It’s where my uncle Saad learned to water-ski during his college summers, an activity that led him to buy a small sailboat that he kept in the Chesapeake Bay and that we’d take out on weekends throughout my childhood. Grundy also is the reason I exist.

My mother did not want to move to Grundy. She had no interest in America. She wanted to stay and live in Amman with her aunts. She was twenty and beautiful; sought after, free of obligation, and known. Plus, when she’d visited Grundy the summer before, it did not appeal (on that same trip, her parents had taken her to New York to see where she was born, and where she played, and the Statue of Liberty, and Sloan Kettering on East Sixth-Eighth and York). But her parents wouldn’t allow her to stay behind in Jordan while they were in the U.S., and so she went with them to Grundy. Just on her way out of Jordan, she met my dad.

She wasn’t especially interested; she liked him all right. When she got to Grundy, where she knew no one and had nothing to do but work on her graduate school applications, she liked him even better. He pursued her from Los Angeles, and he came to visit her in Grundy. When he called to book a room at Smiley’s Motel, the only other hotel in town besides the Anchor Inn, the receptionist asked why he’d bothered calling. “Just come anytime,” he told my dad. “All the rooms are available.”

At the Tri-Cities Airport in Tennessee, my dad rented a red convertible that Sido thought was a sign of inferiority. My dad proposed to her during that trip, in the red convertible. When they got pulled over that afternoon, they panicked and showed the cops their rings. “We’re engaged!” they cried, as though the cops were bothered by their public displays of affection and were charging them with indecency.

Sido was against my mother marrying so young. She was only twenty-one. He wanted her to get a master’s degree first, to establish her career. Plus, though he thought my dad was a nice enough guy, he didn’t think he was right for my mother. Everyone back home was shocked by her decision, too, especially since she’d turned down so many desirable suitors. But my mother insisted. “Samat, Samat, wa aftartu alla basal,” the expression went. She starved, and starved, and broke her fast on an onion. On her wedding day, walking her down the stairs to the ceremony, Sido said to my mother, “If you decide to call the whole thing off now, I’ll understand.”

After the wedding, my mother left Grundy and moved in with my dad in Palos Verdes, a suburb of Los Angeles. She disliked it—it was too quiet, too spread out, too far away from home. She was desperately homesick for the Middle East. “But the view is beautiful!” people would say to her. “What do I care for the view?” she’d respond. “I need people!” As a compromise, they went to Washington, D.C., supposedly en route to Jordan. But they bought a house, and soon enough, a few years became a few more, and though we spent all of our summers overseas, and some winters, we never made the full move back home.

***

When my parents relocated to the East Coast, my grandmother would visit us often. At the time I was born, Ammar was still in high school, and she was back and forth between Grundy and northern Virginia, my brother and I fighting over who got to share the bed with her. When Ammar was sixteen, she left Grundy altogether, and she got an apartment near the mall with Aunty Lina. My grandmother spent her time between her apartment, our house, and the mall. She spent so much time there that, eventually, she got a job at her favorite department store: Bloomingdale’s. Sometimes on the weekends she’d travel to Atlantic City to play the slots, one of her favorite pastimes. She promised us that if she won the big bucks, she’d share her winnings with all of us. 

After my grandfather was diagnosed with brain cancer and given six months to live, Tata returned to Grundy to take care of him. Eventually she brought him to Northern Virginia, so we could all take care of him. He told Saad that he suspected his time working in oncology, at the beginning of the practice and the exposure to radiation and other chemicals, not yet made safe, could’ve had something to do with the aggressive tumor. When he eventually died, his body was flown back to Nablus and buried there.

Even though Nablus didn’t always appreciate him, even though many saw his talents as wasted there, and even though he kept leaving it, my grandfather loved Nablus. It was his other great love, alongside medicine. It hurt him to watch his city fall to Israel, and to experience the tightening choke hold of the occupation. When his daughter Lina was in school, the headmistress called him at the hospital to let him know she’d been reprimanded for cutting class to attend protests. She asked him to punish his daughter in the hopes that she would stop. Sido was furious. “It’s bad enough that I bore her into a country that’s underoccupation,” he says. “Now you want me to tell her she can’t do anything about it?”

But there may have been another reason why Nablus was a difficult place for him to be. When Sido was a boy, his two older brothers were active in the resistance against British colonial rule. They were shot right outside their house, in front of their mother. He and his sister Fikrat watched from the top of the staircase inside the house. 

***

When my daughter Nour was born, my mother realized that she had been born in the same hospital complex. Technically, she’d been in the main building across the street, rather than the new delivery wing, where I was staying. Sloan Kettering, where my grandfather was in residency sixty years earlier, was right next door to where my daughters were delivered. I like to imagine my grandfather scurrying along York Avenue on his way to work, rushing out of the hospital and across the street to my grandmother in labor with my mother, then cradling newborn Randa. I picture them emerging with their newborn baby and standing on the corner to hail a cab that would take them home.

Before a recent trip through southern Virginia, I looked up how long it would take us to drive to Grundy from each of our stops. It was five hours from Charlottesville, six and half hours from Jamestown and colonial Williamsburg, and seven hours from McLean. And so, despite the outsized role Grundy has played in contouring the lives of my family members, its significance in shaping so much of my family’s destiny, I have still never visited. 

Instead, I watched a video of Grundy on YouTube, an aerial view, and I found myself shocked by how beautiful it was. There’s a humility demanded by the mountain that punctuates the center of town, its slopes steep and its terrain thickly forested, with terraces and steppes. It reminded me almost of Nablus, a town that sits between two mountains, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, the old city dipped into the bottom of the valley. 

Adapted from Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope, out from Little, Brown in October.