My Beautiful Old House" and other Fabrications by Edward Said

For decades, the eminent intellectual and activist has told his life story as an allegory of the plight of the… by Justus Reid Weiner

Among spokesmen for the Palestinian cause in our day, surely none is so articulate, or so well-known, as Edward W. Said. The holder of an endowed chair in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, a prolific author of books and articles both scholarly and popular, a frequent lecturer and commentator on radio and television, a sometime diplomatic intermediary and congressional witness, the subject of countless profiles and interviews in the world media, Said-who was born in Jerusalem in 1935-has earned a reputation not only for polemical brilliance but, when it comes to championing Palestinian Arab rights (and assailing Israel for infringing them), a fierce moral zealotry that will not be assuaged.

The adulation in which Said is held by Palestinians themselves is suggested by a recent ceremony honoring him at the U.S.-based Palestinian Heritage Institute that was attended by 450 Arab diplomats and Arab-Americans, as by the overflow audience of 1,000 that gathered to hear him lecture last year in Bethlehem. But his prestige is no less high among American and European academics and intellectuals, who have extravagantly praised his literary scholarship and admire his uncompromising politics. As for the scholarship, his most famous book, Orientalism (1978), with its bold thesis that the Western study of Islam (and by extension other cultures) is itself a form of "colonialism," has had as profound and radicalizing an influence on literary studies in colleges and universities as it has had on Islamic self-perceptions. And as for politics, so stringent is Said's vision of the Middle East that in recent years he has changed from being a supporter of Yasir Arafat to a vociferous opponent, accusing the PLO chairman of having betrayed 50 years of Palestinian aspirations by signing the Oslo agreements with Israel.

The very model of an engaged academic, Said has been politically active since at least the late 1960's, when he co-founded the fervently pro-Palestinian Association of Arab-American University Graduates. In 1974, he was the principal author and translator of Arafat's notorious address to the UN General Assembly in which the PLO leader brandished both a gun and an olive branch; during the Carter years he transmitted overtures between Arafat and the administration, and in the Reagan years participated in the breakthrough meeting of a member of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the PLO's "parliament in exile," with Secretary of State George Shultz; and he himself served for many years as a member of the PNC. Said's books bearing directly on the Palestinian issue include After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986); Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (1988); The Pen and the Sword (1994); The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination (1995); and Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996).

There can be no doubt that a great deal of the moral authority accruing to Edward Said derives as much from his personal as from his intellectual credentials.1 As a living embodiment of the Palestinian cause, he has made much in print and on film of his birth, childhood, and schooling in Palestine, telling a story of idyllic beginnings and violent disruption-of a paradise lost-that resonates with personal pain while also serving as a powerfully compelling metaphor for the larger Palestinian condition. As Salman Rushdie put it in lauding Said's After the Last Sky, in writing about his "internal struggle: the anguish of living with displacement, with exile," Said "enables us to feel the pain of his people."

Both his personal pain and the pain he feels for his people are on especially vivid display in a 1998 BBC documentary that Said both wrote and narrated, In Search of Palestine. The film, aired around the world to mark the 50th anniversary of the Palestinian nakbah ("disaster") of 1948, and recently shown in New York on the local PBS affiliate, features extensive footage of Said standing outside his birthplace at what is now 10 Brenner Street in Jewish western Jerusalem.

But just the mention of that birthplace confronts us with a problem. Although Said has defined his own intellectual vocation as one of "tell[ing] the truth against extremely difficult odds"-he has sweepingly declared that the duty of the intellectual is "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible"-it turns out that, in retailing the facts of his own personal biography over the years, he has spoken anything but the plain, direct, or honest truth. Instead, he has served up, and consciously encouraged others to serve up, a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations carefully tailored to strengthen his wider ideological agenda-and in particular to promote the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel.

For the past three years I have been looking into the core autobiographical assertions made by Said about his childhood in Palestine-a childhood that he has repeatedly asserted is central to the formation of his political thought and indeed of his emblematic political identity as a Palestinian refugee. My search, a fascinating adventure in itself, took me through sometimes obscure public records and archives in five countries on four continents and involved tracking down and interviewing numerous relatives, neighbors, school classmates, and professional colleagues. Virtually everything I learned, the principal conclusions of which are set out below, contradicts the story of Said's early life as Said has told it.2

To complicate matters still further, however, some time after completing the manuscript of this article, I learned of the forthcoming publication of another new book by Said, a memoir entitled Out of Place that is due to be released later this month.3 Remarkably-but, as I shall have reason to speculate later, perhaps not surprisingly-this new book thoroughly revises the personal tale Said has been reciting all these years, bringing it into greater conformity with the truth while at the same time ignoring his 30 years of carefully crafted deception.

But I am getting ahead of myself. In order to untangle the strands of this enigma, we must begin by examining what has been the standard version of the life of Edward Said and see where and how it diverges from the facts.

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II

For a characteristic rendition of the standard version, we need look no farther than a long and typically admiring feature article on Said that appeared almost exactly a year ago in the New York Times ("A Palestinian Confronts Time," by Janny Scott, September 19, 1998). Here is the relevant paragraph:

Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first twelve years of his life there, the eldest child and only son of a successful Palestinian Christian businessman. The family moved [elsewhere in this same Times piece, the word is "fled"] to Cairo in late 1947, five months before war broke out between Palestinian Arabs and Jews over plans to partition Palestine.

And here, from Current Biography Yearbook (1989), in a five-page profile personally approved by its subject, is a more expansive take:

Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem in what was then Palestine on November 1, 1935, the oldest child and only son of Wadie Said, a prosperous businessman. … The family lived in an exclusive section of West Jerusalem. … Baptized as an Episcopalian, Edward Said attended St. George's, an Anglican preparatory school, where his extracurricular activities included riding, boxing, gymnastics, and playing the piano.

… At the age of twelve, Edward Said was forced to use a pass when traveling between his home and his school. "The situation was dangerous and inconvenient," he recalled … during an interview for New York magazine (January 23, 1989). In December 1947, the Said family left Jerusalem and settled in Cairo, Egypt. … "Israel was established; Palestine was destroyed," Said wrote in his book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives.

But why rely on the words of others? Both of these summaries merely recapitulate Said's own oft-recited outline of his early life:

I was born, in November 1935, in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo. … ["Palestine, Then and Now," Harper's, December 1992]

I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt. ["Between Worlds: Edward Said Makes Sense of His Life," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998]

… my recollections of my early days in Palestine, my youth, the first twelve or thirteen years of my life before I left Palestine. [The Pen and the Sword]

This same rendering of his early years recurs over and over again in writings both by and about Said. (Thus, for example, the website of the Nation, a magazine with which he is affiliated as a music critic: "In 1948, Said and his family were dispossessed from Palestine and settled in Cairo.") It is what undergirds his self-definition as an archetypal "exile"-i.e., one who, like his people in general, was separated from his homeland in a sudden act of historic violence. Except for the detail of his birth, it is a tissue of falsehoods.

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III

Here are the bare bones of the truth: Said's father Wadie (also known as William) grew up and went to school in Jerusalem but evidently emigrated in 1911 to the United States. During World War I, he reportedly served with American forces in Europe before returning to the Middle East with a U.S. passport to start what would become a very successful career in business. At least nine years prior to his son's birth in 1935, however, Wadie Said was already residing permanently in Cairo, Egypt. There, according to the 1926 French edition of the Egyptian Directory, he owned the Standard Stationery Company. The company prospered sufficiently to open a branch in Alexandria in 1929 and in due course a second store in Cairo itself.

It was to Cairo that Edward Said's mother Hilda (Musa), of Lebanese origin, moved upon marrying his father in 1932, and it was in Cairo that the nuclear family continued to reside over the ensuing decades in a series of ever more elegant and spacious apartments, the last three of which were located in Cairo's best neighborhood on the island of Zamalek in the Nile River. Documentation of their residences and other pertinent facts can be traced in decades' worth of consecutive annual editions of the Egyptian Directory, the Cairo telephone directory, Who's Who in Egypt and the Middle East, and other sources; a long-time family friend, Huda Gindy, a professor of English at Cairo University, has reminisced in an interview about her former neighbors, the Saids, who from 1940 lived upstairs from her at 1 El-Aziz Osman Street. By 1949, the capital of Standard Stationery was listed in the Egyptian Trade Index at the then very significant sum of 120,000 Egyptian pounds.

And Jerusalem? In that city lived Wadie Said's brother Boulos Yusef, his wife Nabiha, and their five children. To this branch of the family, as to other destinations, the affluent Cairo-based Saids made periodic visits. In November 1935, during one of those visits, Edward Said was born. On his birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address. Similarly blank is the entry for a local address in the church record of Edward Said's baptism, an event that likewise took place in Jerusalem two years later. Of the 29 telephone and commercial directories for Jerusalem and Palestine from 1931 through 1948 that I was able to locate, more than half carry business and/or residential listings for Boulos Said and his wife. There are no listings for Edward Said's parents in any of the directories, whether in English, Hebrew, or Arabic.

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IV

As for the house in Talbieh (Talbiya), that is a story unto itself. In his article in Harper's, as in the much longer version of the same piece that he published in the (London) Observer, and as in other iterations of this theme elsewhere, Said has wrenchingly recounted the nostalgic visit he paid in early 1992 to his childhood roots in Jerusalem and in particular to this house at 10 Brenner Street. The Observer article was accompanied by a large photograph of the author perched on a stone wall with the caption: "Edward Said in front of his family's old home in Jerusalem."

Footage of Said and his son Wadie outside this same structure also features prominently in the BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine. Its deep symbolic significance was further underlined at the ceremonies honoring him at the Palestine Heritage Institute, at the end of which a painting of the house was presented to him as a gift. In an interview last March with the Jerusalem Times, an English-language Palestinian newspaper, Said had this to say:

I feel even more depressed when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al-Talbiyeh in east [sic, western] Jerusalem, which has been turned into a "Christian embassy." I went there a few days ago and took several photographs.

But wait During his visit in 1992, according to Said, he was able to locate his "family's house" only because a cousin then living in Canada "had drawn me a map from memory that he sent along with a copy of the title deed." If that is so-if, that is, Said really had in hand a copy of the title deed to what he has described as "my beautiful old house"-then he could not have helped noticing the absence on it of his parents' names, his siblings' names, or his own name. For it never was, and is not now, their or his house.

In the ledgers kept at the Land Registry Office in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period, the earliest entry for the house in question is dated February 14, 1941. It records a transfer of fractional interests in the property from its registered owner, Yusef Said (Edward Said's grandfather), to Mrs. Boulos Yusef Said (Edward Said's aunt) and her five children. And that is all. There is no record of Edward Said's parents owning either the house or any interest in it.

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If his nuclear family had no ownership interest in the house at 10 Brenner Street, neither did he or they ever permanently reside in it. (Nor, apparently, did his aunt and cousins until 1942.) After being built in the early 1930's, the structure was initially divided into two apartments, each with a separate entrance from the outside; in 1942, a third apartment was created in the basement. From 1938 to 1946 (that is, from the time Edward Said was roughly three to the time he was eleven), the upstairs level was rented out to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as its consulate general, and then from 1946 to 1952 to the successor government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was used both for office space and for housing; during World War II, the exiled King Peter II lived in it for about six weeks.

Is it not curious in the extreme that Said, while on record as remembering the "rooms [in this house] where as a boy he read Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan, and where he and his mother read Shakespeare to each other," has nowhere brought to mind the presence upstairs of the Yugoslavian consulate, the comings and goings of visa-seekers, diplomats, and politicians, including for a time the king of Yugoslavia himself, or the arrival of limousines and their elegantly attired occupants for official functions like the annual Yugoslavian independence-day reception? On November 29, 1947, the very night the UN voted in favor of the partition plan for Palestine, and a couple of weeks before he has told us the Saids were forced to leave for Cairo, this reception was attended by no lesser figures than the British-appointed mayor of Jerusalem; Golda Meir, then director of the political department at the Jewish Agency; Hussein Haldi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee; and most of the city's social and political elite.

As for the downstairs, main-entrance level of the house, it was rented from about 1936 to 1938 by the Iranian consulate. Then, after 1938, this and the basement level were leased to the illustrious German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, his wife, and his two teenage granddaughters, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. The Buber family was forced out of the house in early 1942 (when Edward Said would have been about seven) in a dispute with the owners-that is, Nabiha (Mrs. Boulos Yusef) Said-who broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for their personal use, winning a judge's ruling in favor of eviction. Buber's granddaughters, from whom I heard this account, also accurately remember the names of Nabiha Said and two of her boys, Yusef and Robert. Another tenant of the house during the latter Mandate period remembers George, still another son of the family. None remembers Edward or any of his four sisters.

Is it not curious, again, that Martin Buber's residence in this house should have gone unnoticed by Edward Said? Actually, that is not so; at least, not quite. In 1992, Said wrote of having heard, years earlier, "that Martin Buber had lived in the house for a time after 1948" (emphasis added). Last year, in a speech at Birzeit University on the West Bank, he amplified this thought with characteristic vehemence:

The house from which my family departed in 1948-was displaced-was also the house in which the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber lived for a while, and Buber of course was a great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn't mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced.

But the truth is the other way around: it was Said's aunt who evicted the Bubers, an event-surely a memorable one-that took place during the very period when Edward Said was allegedly growing up in the selfsame house, and long before Israel's war of independence in 1948. But there can be little wonder why neither that event, nor the presence in and subsequent removal from the building of Martin Buber's surely no less memorable library of some 15,000 books, has ever figured in his meticulous recollections of "my beautiful old house … in Al-Talbiyeh." The Bubers and their library were there. Said was not.

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V

None of this, to be sure, is to gainsay the pos sibility or even the likelihood that, after 1942, when the Bubers had departed and Nabiha Said and her five children moved in, Edward Said's nuclear family may have stayed for brief periods with their cousins on the main entrance floor at 10 Brenner Street. By now, however, both families would have been quite large, while the apartment in question had a grand total of only four bedrooms. Assuming two were set aside for parents, this would have meant accommodating ten children in the remaining two bedrooms, without even taking into account the needs of grandparents or live-in servants, drivers, cooks, and the like. It is hard to imagine Wadie Said, accustomed as he was to spacious arrangements, enduring this for any great length of time.

And that brings us to another element in Said's reconstruction of his Jerusalem childhood: the question of his schooling.

According to the standard version, he attended St. George's Anglican preparatory school in eastern Jerusalem, "along with most of the male members of my family" (as he put it in his 1992 piece in Harper's). In the recent BBC documentary, Said is seen touring this school, which still exists. In the headmaster's office, where he turns the pages of an old, leather-bound student registry, he locates on camera the listing for a Jewish student named David Ezra, whom he says he remembers clearly. A vignette of David Ezra also turns up in Said's new memoir, Out of Place.

Interestingly, in this segment of In Search of Palestine we are not shown or told about any listing for Edward Said himself in the St. George's student registry. And for good reason: neither in the particular registry shown on camera nor in the school's other two old leather-bound registry books is there any record of his having attended this institution as he has claimed. Nor does David Ezra, who today goes by the name of David Eben-Ezra, have any recollection whatsoever of a classmate by the name of Edward Said-though in 1998 he was easily able to recall for me the names of nearly all his other classmates at St. George's. Not even the childhood movie footage of Edward Said that has been incorporated in the BBC documentary, not even old still photographs of his class, succeeded in jogging Eben-Ezra's otherwise quite remarkable powers of recall. He did comment, though, on Said's claim in the TV documentary that the two of them had sat together in the back of the classroom. Because of his poor eyesight, Eben-Ezra always sat in front.

None of this-again-is to gainsay the possibility of the young Said's having been now and then a temporary student at St. George's while on visits to his Jerusalem cousins. He might well have become aware of David Ezra and others in the school without having stayed long enough to enroll and have his own presence recorded in its official registry books. But so modest a possibility hardly fits what up to now has constituted the standard version of his life from birth until the age of twelve. To cite it one more time: "I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt."

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VI

Let us look now at the latter part of that sentence: that is, at the circumstances of the Said family's departure as "refugees" from Jerusalem to Cairo, an event Said himself has repeatedly placed in mid-December 1947.

First, the standard version. In evoking the ominous atmosphere of those days, Said has cited the fact (duly recorded in his profile in Current Biography Yearbook) that even he, an innocent twelve-year-old schoolboy, had to produce a pass to traverse three British security zones between his home in Talbieh and his school, St. George's, in eastern Jerusalem. But what really caused his family to flee "in panic," he has recalled, was something far more menacing: in December, "a Jewish-forces sound truck warned Arabs to leave the neighborhood" (interview with Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 1997). In other words, the family's departure was a forcible one, a product of the incipient usurpation of the entire country, and the banishment of its indigenous Palestinian-Arab inhabitants, by the Zionists.

Neither of these claims withstands scrutiny.

If Said and his parents had in fact been living regularly in Palestine during the years prior to 1947, they would have become accustomed, as was every citizen of Jerusalem, to routinely producing identification and zone passes at the demand of British soldiers manning roadblocks-an inconvenience that was hardly "dangerous," as Said has termed it, but was, rather, designed to facilitate the search for fugitives or contraband weapons, to prevent violence between Arabs and Jews, and to protect British personnel. More to the point, at age twelve young Edward Said would hardly have been required to carry individual identification to and from school or at any other time; as David Eben-Ezra (along with several of his contemporaries) has attested, a St. George's uniform and/or a schoolbag with books would have been quite sufficient.

The matter of the "sound-truck" warning is a bit more complicated. Contemporary accounts indicate that relations between Jews and Arabs were, as it happens, quite good in the affluent and cosmopolitan neighborhood of Talbieh. (According to the then British mayor of Jerusalem, the area was "shared fairly evenly" between the two groups, though Said with his typical disregard for facts has asserted that its population was almost exclusively Arab.) In the five-and-a-half month period between the end of November 1947 and the middle of May 1948-that is, between the UN partition resolution and the establishment of the state of Israel-only two incidents of intercommunal violence marred Talbieh's calm.

In the first, on December 21, 1947, an Anglo-Jewish journalist for the Palestine Post was shot dead by Arabs. In the second, which occurred on February 11, 1948, a member of the Haganah, the indigenous Jewish defense force, was wounded by an Arab, and that same day, at the unauthorized behest of the Haganah sector commander, a sound van proceeded to drive through the area, warning Arabs to evacuate. According to the Hebrew newspaper Ha'aretz (February 12, 1948), the three Haganah men in the vehicle were promptly arrested by British police.

Some Arab residents of Talbieh apparently did pack up and go after this incident in February, but only temporarily, returning within a few days from nearby locales on the assurances of British police and clergy. The numbers could hardly have been large, since no mention of their flight appears in the leading Palestinian-Arab newspapers at the time. The permanent evacuation took place later, with the departure of British forces and the capture of Talbieh and the rest of southern Jerusalem by the Haganah. That occurred in mid-May, although the leading book on this subject by the Institute for Palestine Studies, a pro-PLO think tank, puts the date two weeks earlier, on April 30.

In any case, we are speaking of a period four and a half to five months after the time Said claims for a certainty the defining incident took place, and two and a half to three months after the mini-incident of mid-February. For what it is worth, the voluminous British documents from this period, including declassified security telegrams, make no mention of Palestinians leaving Talbieh, for any cause or reason, during the month of December 1947.

From these multiple internal inconsistencies and discrepancies from the historical record, one cannot avoid the reasonable conclusion that just as Edward Said and his nuclear family were not long-term or permanent residents in Talbieh in the 1930's and 1940's, so were they not resident there during the final months of the British Mandate. They thus cannot be considered "refugees" or "exiles" from Palestine in any meaningful sense of those two very weighty and politically charged terms.

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VII

Nor, of course, did they arrive in Cairo for the first time in late 1947. For it was in Cairo that Edward Said in fact grew up and played with his childhood companions. It was in Cairo that he attended the Gezira Preparatory School, and in Cairo that he was enrolled, at the age of almost fourteen, at Victoria College. And it was from Cairo, in 1951, that he was finally sent by his father to complete his secondary education at the Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts.

As I indicated earlier, the history of the Said family's presence in Cairo can be traced through public records and the clear recollections of friends and neighbors. It has now also been confirmed by Said himself in his forthcoming memoir, Out of Place4 In this book, with its weirdly apposite title, the man who for decades has presented himself to the world as a professional refugee, who has powerfully described the traumatic effect on himself and his family of their sudden, panicked exile from the beloved city of his birth and childhood, who has harped repeatedly on the horrors of dispossession, of losing house and home, school, companions, and, in the case of his father, livelihood itself, sharply reverses course. Jerusalem, it turns out, was not the soul and center of Edward Said's youth, the place to which, as he averred in 1998, "nearly everything in my early life could be traced." Jerusalem was one of several family vacation spots. The center of its existence, from years prior to his birth until the early 1960's, was Cairo, Egypt.

If Said reverses course in this book, however, he does so silently, without acknowledging the bombshell disparity of his present account from his previous ones. Instead, he methodically camouflages and backfills, calmly giving us a "revised standard version" comprising hundreds of pages of family minutiae, all remembered 50 or 60 years later in picayune (and often boring) detail, not least when it comes to narrating the course of his budding if thwarted youthful sexuality and the humiliations he suffered at the hands of parents, classmates, and teachers. By this titillating means are we ourselves, no doubt, meant to be seduced into overlooking the egregious departures of his latest autobiography from the autobiography we have had delivered to us in segments over three decades of books, essays, lectures, interviews, and filmed reminiscences. Or perhaps the two are meant to chug along in our minds like a single locomotive on two parallel tracks, with neither version to be held to so old-fashioned a standard as the objective truth.

Why Said should have chosen this particular moment to release a revised standard version must remain a matter of speculation. For myself, I cannot rule out the possibility that the 85 interviews conducted over the course of my own three-year investigation, including many with persons known to him, may have alerted him to the urgency of retrieving from amnesia this amazingly full reconstruction of his Cairo childhood. If so, that very fullness, characterized by a near-photographic recall of everything from his parents' conversations to his adolescent wet dreams, might well be intended as a stay against skepticism; for how could anyone so candid ever have intended to conceal anything?

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Whatever his motive, however, one thing this tireless paladin clearly does not intend to do is to permit a mere book, even one written by him, to interfere with his larger political agenda. That much, at least, was made perfectly clear in his BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine.

For in that film, standing with his son and a friend in front of 10 Brenner Street in Jerusalem, Said gesticulates at the house "my family owned" and, voice shaking with emotion, discusses the possibility of securing its rightful return from the Israeli authorities. Similarly, in an interview earlier this year, he reiterated his claim both to the house and to a business putatively owned by his father in Jerusalem, the Palestine Educational Company (a firm that "made office equipment and sold books").

Interviewer: I was wondering, would you accept financial compensation from the Israeli government for these losses?

Edward Said: You're damn straight.

And elsewhere: "I lost-and my family lost its property and rights in 1948." Compensation is owed for that property, he insists, as for all lost Palestinian property. "I've never believed in giving that up. If we lost it, then it has to be paid for by the Israelis."

Now, leave aside the plain fact that the war of 1948 was instigated not by Israel but by the Palestinian-Arab leadership, which launched hostilities against the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine after refusing to accept the UN partition resolution. Leave aside, too, the no less plain fact that over the course of the ensuing war, which saw every neighboring Arab nation rush in on the Palestinian side, not only did hundreds of thousands of (genuine) Palestinian refugees leave the Mandatory territory for various reasons, but many hundreds of thousands of Jews were simultaneously driven out of Arab countries, eastern Jerusalem, the Old City, and what later came to be known as the West Bank, and arrived in Israel traumatized and destitute. This alone suggests that if consideration is to be extended to the claims of some refugees, it must be extended to the claims of all.5 But leave all that aside, and ask only this: why, if Edward Said has any legal basis for his assertion, has he not lifted a finger to secure the financial restitution due him?

It cannot be from ignorance of Israeli procedure. He has mentioned the actual filing process itself in one of his books (After the Last Sky), and, as he must know, that process is simplicity itself. All that is required is the completion of a two-page form that can be filled out in English, Hebrew, or Arabic. Claimants may file for themselves, or a lawyer may file on their behalf. There is no fee. In short, the risk is zero, while the gain could be substantial.

Perhaps little was to be hoped for, it is true, in connection with his father's alleged interest in the Palestine Educational Company. This store stood on Jaffa Street in an area looted and burned by Arab rioters in late 1947, heavily damaged by shell fire during the war of 1948-49, and remaining in no-man's-land between Jordanian and Israeli positions until Jerusalem was reunited by Israel in the Six-Day war of 1967; by that time, certainly, there could have been nothing left to salvage. But the house is another matter: according to the head of the most prominent real-estate agency in Israel, the building at 10 Brenner Street is worth, at the most conservative estimate, $1.8 million today. And, financial gain apart, think of the example an action of this kind on Said's part would set for his fellow Palestinians, and of the inestimable political value that would accrue from what would inevitably become a highly publicized and, to Israel, potentially quite embarrassing proceeding.

But there will of course be no filing, either for store or house. Even had the Palestine Educational Company been classified by Israel as absentee (rather than abandoned) property, it is unlikely that Wadie Said could have personally suffered financial loss from its destruction. Although I did find his name or initials in some listings for the store in local telephone books and (more pertinently) business directories, that was only prior to 1931; from 1931 onward, the solitary name listed is that of Boulos Yusef Said. Perhaps, then, for a few years after he moved permanently to Cairo in about 1926, Wadie Said retained some interest in the firm; anything beyond that seems highly unlikely. And as for the house at 10 Brenner Street, well, that is a subject we have already covered.

Still, I cannot leave this matter of "reparations," to use Edward Said's inflammatory term, without two final comments. The first is that, even if pride were to have prevented him from submitting a claim of any kind to an Israeli government office, he had ample opportunity, either by mail or during his several visits in the last years, to register with one or both of the Palestinian organizations that have undertaken to document such claims of ownership; as of 1998, neither had been contacted by him.

The second comment is this: whatever pecuniary losses the family of Wadie Said did or-more likely-did not suffer in Jerusalem in the late 1940's, they pale beside the devastating losses that befell him and them a few years later in Egypt. As the current manager of the Standard Stationery Company confirmed in an interview last year, and as Said now acknowledges in Out of Place, a revolutionary mob burned down Wadie Said's flagship Cairo store as well as a local branch store in 1952. Several years later, the successfully rebuilt business was nationalized in a purge of Western influence instituted by Egypt's president, the revolutionary dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. (Wadie Said, it will be remembered, was a foreigner with an American passport.)

Yet, in contrast to the vigor with which Edward Said has spoken about his putative claims against Israel, he has been strangely silent concerning his family's very real and weighty losses of property in Egypt. One can readily imagine why. Not only would dwelling on those losses highlight the fact of his family's long-term residence in Cairo rather than Jerusalem, it might retroactively compromise Edward Said's own self-acknowledged enthusiasms as a onetime "Nasserite." Or perhaps he just knows that, unlike in Israel, where the rule of law holds sway, the prospects of recovering anything at all in Egypt are negligible to nil.

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VIII

In his many narratives of his childhood in Palestine, Edward Said has painted the years before 1948 as a romantic idyll, in which life was simple, harmonious, and happy. This perfection was rudely destroyed by the outbreak of violence that preceded full-scale war in 1948-49, forcing him out of his "beautiful old house" into a 50-year exile that has been, for him, the "central metaphor" not only of his personal biography but of his very identity, and that drives his campaign for redress. For Edward Said in this scenario, now substitute the Palestinian people-as his readers and listeners are meant to do-and one begins to gain some apprehension of the myth-driven passions that have animated the revanchist program of so many Palestinian nationalists, whose expanding political ambitions often seem, even to sympathetic observers, permanently insusceptible of being satisfied through the normal processes of politics.

Edward Said is also an eminent scholar and literary figure, the author of a book entitled Representations of the Intellectual and of such uncompromising definitions of an intellectual's responsibility as the one I cited early on: "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible." What are we to make of the fact that, in his own case, the plain, direct, and honest truth is so radically at odds with the parable of Palestinian identity he has been at such pains to construct over the decades? For, to say it one last time, he himself grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.

Whatever we do finally make of all this, there can be no denying that the parable itself is a lie. An artful lie; a skillful lie; above all, a very useful and by now widely accepted lie-but a lie. As he continues the process of silently "spinning" this lie, a process now auspiciously launched in Out of Place, it will be especially interesting to see who among his legions of admirers, or among the friends of the Palestinian people, will notice or care. That is a question with reverberations far, far beyond the shifts and dodges and brazen misrepresentations of one prevaricating intellectual.

_____________

1 Both his scholarship and his grasp of political and cultural history have, in fact, been subjected to severe criticism, though this has hardly sufficed to undermine his reputation or to prevent his recent accession to the presidency of the prestigious Modern Language Association.

2 Readers interested in the documentation for this article can find it at COMMENTARY's website, www.commentarymagazine.com, where I also list the many individuals to whom I am indebted for assistance.

3 "Knopf, 352 pp., $26.95.

4 To be completely fair, hints of the truth have also appeared in fugitive places over the years, including in a 1987 article by Said in, of all venues, House & Garden. My attempts to verify the record with Said himself were unsuccessful; a request for an interview, made through his assistant at Columbia, Zaineb Istrabadi, met with no response.

5 I have written in favor of an international tribunal to resolve the documented claims of Palestinian refugees ("The Palestinian Refugees' 'Right to Return' and the Peace Process," Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 1997).

The False Prophet of Palestine: In the Wake of the Edward Said Revelations

Professor Edward Said of Columbia University is the Western world's foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Said, a world-class writer, elevated his personal parable of a paradise destroyed and dispossessed to his trump card in articles, books, lectures, interviews, and television documentaries.

Justus Reid Weiner

Table of Contents

  1. Unraveling the Mystery
  2. An Avatar of Palestinian Suffering
  3. Evicting Martin Buber
  4. Said’s Network of Friends
  5. The Response of Independent Journalists
  6. Generating a Smokescreen
  7. Should Intellectuals Lie?

No. 422 9 Shevat 5760 / 16 January 2000

Recently, Commentary magazine published "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications of Edward Said," an expose I had written of the myths Said had created while reinventing his life story to become a "Palestinian refugee."3 In addition, the Wall Street Journal published a condensed version entitled "The False Prophet of Palestine" (August 26, 1999).

Unraveling the Mystery

The unraveling of this mystery began as I was preparing an article on "Peace and its Discontents: Israeli and Palestinian Intellectuals Who Oppose the Current Peace Process," which appeared in the Cornell International Law Journal (Winter 1996). Part of my research included reading Said's book Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process.

Out of natural curiosity, I tried to find out more about this highly persuasive and influential intellectual-academic and his tragic childhood/adolescence in Jerusalem, especially since I had lived around the corner from what he nostalgically referred to as "my beautiful old house" on Brenner Street, and I had worked for years in an office behind St. George's school which Said claimed to have attended.

Yet when I sought out people who might recall Said or at least could remember the prevailing conditions prior to or during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, much of what I discovered was at odds with the "facts" as presented by Said. As I dug deeper, I found a pervasive pattern of falsity. When I began discovering discrepancies in Said's frequent autobiographic references, I telephoned his office at Columbia University to request an interview, but Said did not return the call.

The publication of my exposé triggered a major controversy, "detonating one of the nastiest rows of its kind to rend New York's intelligentsia in years," according to the British Observer. Scores of articles appeared in far-flung publications from Finland to India and from Syria to Canada. The (London) Daily Telegraph deemed the article "a remarkable piece of investigative journalism," and it has been nominated for a prestigious award in the United States.

An Avatar of Palestinian Suffering

Where and under what circumstances an intellectual or academic grew up would ordinarily be of little consequence, but this case is different. His "entire" family, as Said tells it, was "ethnically cleansed."

In his narratives, Edward Said paints romantic images of pre-1948 Palestine as a paradise, where his life was simple, harmonious, and happy. This parable of perfection was rudely destroyed by the outbreak of inter-communal conflict which preceded the 1948 War, allegedly forcing young Edward out of his home and school in Jerusalem and into "the Palestine exile" for "50 years."4

According to Said, "the central metaphor for me is exile,"5 and "1947 was for me and my family the last year of our residence in Jerusalem."6 He claimed on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour that "I lost – and my family lost – its property and rights in 1948."7

Yet after more than three years of research in archives, libraries, and public record offices on four continents, together with more than 85 interviews, a very different picture of Said's life has emerged. Edward Said in fact created a parable out of the first twelve years of his life and used it to perpetrate a multi-level deception on Western intellectuals and his Palestinian admirers alike.

Edward Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt. His childhood friend Professor Hoda Gindi of Cairo University, who lived downstairs in the same apartment house, confirmed that Said was the scion of a wealthy Cairene family. As was discovered, his father was an American citizen who moved to Cairo from Jerusalem a decade before Edward was born. Living in Cairo until his departure to attend prep school in America in 1951, Edward Said resided with his family in luxurious apartment buildings in the exclusive Zamalek neighborhood, played with childhood friends in the manicured private gardens of the Aquarium Grotto, attended private English and American schools, was driven around in his father's large black American cars by his chauffeur, and enjoyed the facilities at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the son of one of its only Arab members.

Said's father was the owner of a thriving office supply business, the Standard Stationary Company, based in Cairo. In 1952 a revolutionary mob burned his flagship store (and a branch) to the ground, and several years later the nationalization program instituted by Egyptian President Nasser ultimately forced Said's father out of the country. Thus, the truly devastating financial losses suffered by Said's father were in no way connected to Israel.

Evicting Martin Buber

In a speech at Birzeit University in 1998, Said publicly charged that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, known as an apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, had lived in the Brenner Street house and "did not mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."8

Once again, the truth involves a very different story. The house at 10 Brenner Street was built in the early 1930s and its registered owners were Said's grandfather and later his aunt and her five children. There is no record in the Land Registry of Edward Said's parents ever owning any interest in the house. The building was initially divided into two apartments which were rented out from 1936 onwards. After 1938, one apartment (and a downstairs storeroom) was leased to Martin Buber and his extended family, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. The Bubers, relying on the long-term nature of their lease, made major improvements in the apartment and landscaped the garden.

In early 1942, Edward Said's aunt broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for her family's personal use, winning a judge's ruling in favor of eviction, and forcing Buber to vacate together with his library of some 15,000 books.9 Given the shortage of housing in Palestine during World War II, their eviction could not have come at a worse time. Curiously, this event occurred during the very period when Edward Said was himself allegedly growing up in the same house, and long before Israel's War of Independence in 1948, but Said never mentioned the presence of Martin Buber or his library in "my beautiful old house" during those years.

Said's Network of Friends

As responses to my article began to pour in, an obvious dichotomy emerged. First, there was the network of Said's friends whose names had come up frequently in my research into his writings. Their articles, editorials, and book reviews regularly lauded Said the man and often even Said the icon. Interestingly, the admiration was mutual as Said had written favorably about them (or their writings). For example, in 1986 Salman Rushdie reviewed Said's book After the Last Sky in the Guardian; then Said wrote favorably about Rushdie in the Washington Post and reviewed his book The Jaguar Smile in the London Review of Books. On at least three other occasions Rushdie and Said have engaged in mutually flattering conversations which were later published. Since the current controversy broke, Rushdie has jumped in on Said's side with an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail (Canada) which also appeared in The Age (Melbourne).

Next there is Christopher Hitchens, who in 1988 co-edited Blaming the Victims with Said and later wrote a laudatory foreword to Said's book Peace and Its Discontents. Recently, Hitchens has devoted two of his columns in The Nation and a review of Said's Out of Place for the (Canadian) National Post to vitriolic attacks on me and my critique of Said's intellectual dishonesty. In a recent radio interview, Said referred to Hitchens as "my defender."

Said's close connection with Alexander Cockburn goes back to at least the early 1980s, when a scandal broke concerning an undisclosed $10,000 "grant." In 1982, the now-defunct Institute of Arab Studies secretly gave Cockburn a $10,000 "grant" to write a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.10 When the payment was exposed, Cockburn, who had never disclosed it to his editor or readers, was sacked from the Village Voice. Meanwhile his friend Edward Said, Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Arab Studies, under questioning arising out of the scandal, defended its work in the New York Times.

Apparently undeterred by the uproar, Cockburn's book Corruptions of the Empire was reviewed by Edward Said in the London Review of Books under the title of "Alexander the Brilliant." Said wrote, "Why, in the desert of today's journalistic mediocrity and cowardly trimming, anyone with Cockburn's gifts and courage should be modest, or mock-modest, I shall leave to others to discuss." Cockburn later provided a blurb for the inside cover page of Said's Representations of the Intellectual. He has on at least two occasions touted Said in his column in The Nation, and recently devoted his column in that magazine to a no-holds-barred attack on my research. Cockburn also published similar attacks in his columns in the Los Angles Times and in the New York Press.

The Response of Independent Journalists

Fortunately, there exist many dedicated journalists who took the trouble to investigate and ascertain how the parties' claims stood up to analysis. This group, none of whom I have ever had dealings with, includes Daniel Johnson of the Daily Telegraph, Jeff Jacoby syndicated in the Boston Globe, Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix, Premen Addy in The Hindu, Charles Krauthammer in Time, Mark Berley in the New York Post, Neil Seeman in the (Canadian) National Post, Hillel Halkin in The Forward, and David Horowitz at salon.com. Despite their efforts, judging from what appeared in print, not a single journalist succeeded in pinning down Said on even one of the direct quotes which I included in my article. I was repeatedly told that he became angry and simply dismissed any effort to address the key evidence of his duplicity.

Generating a Smokescreen

In the months since the publication of the article, Said and his followers have never attempted, in any systematic way, to refute the evidence. Instead, Said's network of friends echoed and amplified his attacks, publishing suspiciously similar criticisms of my work. Not only are the specific points of attack frequently identical, but similar phraseology suggests common parentage.

One of the most curious allegations that occurred in the aftermath of the article was Said's accusation published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (August 26, 1999) that I had threatened his cousin Robert Said, a man whom I have never met or even spoken with. Actually, it was my Belgian research assistant, Paul Lambert, who is half my age, who conducted the interview with Robert Said in his office in Amman on January 23, 1997. According to Lambert, today a cadet in the Belgian diplomatic corps,

Robert Said met me in his impressive office, on the second floor of a large office supply company. Although initially gracious – I was offered a cup of coffee – once I began asking basic questions about Edward's childhood and the house [on Brenner St. in Jerusalem], Robert Said refused to answer. He then turned verbally abusive, shouting insults and gesticulating with his hands….At no time did I…threaten him saying anything like "it would be better if you answered questions." This claim is manifestly factually incorrect, I would even say grotesque: if one should have felt threatened it was me. Indeed, Robert Said called in one of his bouncer co-workers and went on shouting at me unpleasant things like "why did you really come here?," "you are a tool," "you have been brainwashed," and eventually he stated that "the Jews are the worst people in the world." [Lambert is a Flemish Catholic.] Frankly, I was rather concerned about my own safety than about the interview. Please note my position: 25y old, alone as a non-Arabic speaker in the middle of unknown Amman – not exactly a position to threaten anyone.11

Should Intellectuals Lie?

This controversy raises larger questions than simply the myth-making and selective memory of Edward Said. As a world-class intellectual, it would be revealing to pose to him the following questions: Should intellectuals lie? Should they deceive or misrepresent personal or historical facts? Should they remember and forget selectively? Is such conduct ever justified? While some radical intellectuals go so far as to claim that all knowledge is a form of duping and others deny the very existence of "truth," Professor Edward Said, despite his radical politics, has taken a traditionalist approach to this topic. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Said has noted that "there is a great difference between political and intellectual behavior. The intellectual's role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly and as honestly as possible….the intellectual's constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth unadorned."12

Indeed, in his new memoir Out of Place (1999), published after he became aware of my investigation, Said presents a radically revised version of his life in which he describes his Cairo childhood in great detail, and we learn that his schooling from age 6 to 16 took place in three different Cairo institutions. The publication of Said's new memoir a month after my article appeared in Commentary placed his defenders in an untenable situation, because without admitting to the inconsistency with his previous autobiographical writings, Said completely confirmed the core discoveries of my research.

The cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to which so many of Said's friends assert their devotion, is not well-served by historical lies. The fact is that the "best-known Palestinian intellectual in the world" (as he was recently described on the BBC) made wholesale political use of the supposed circumstances of his childhood, weaving an elaborate myth of paradise and expulsion from paradise out of one or two circumstances and a raft of inventions. Edward Said was never a refugee from Palestine, but he is certainly a refugee from the truth.

* * *

Notes

 

  1. Edward Said, "Palestine, Then and Now: An Exile's Journey Through Israel and the Occupied Territories," Harper's Magazine, December 1992, p. 47.
  2. Edward Said, "Between Worlds: Edward Said Makes Sense of His Life," London Review of Books, May 7, 1998, p. 3.
  3. Commentary, September 1999.
  4. Edward Said, "Fifty Years in the Wilderness: A State of Dispossession and Violence," The Guardian, May 2, 1998, p. 21.
  5. Bryan Appleyard, "Reflections from the Tightrope," The Independent (London), June 23, 1993, p. 23.
  6. Edward Said, Lecture on "The Tragedy of Palestine" at Rice University, Houston, March 26, 1998.
  7. Interview with Edward Said, Educational Broadcasting and GWETA, the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, August 1, 1991, Transcript #4129.
  8. Edward Said, Lecture at the Fifth International Conference for "The Scenarios of Palestine," Birzeit University, November 12, 1998.
  9. Interview with Barbara (Buber) Goldschmidt, November 10, 1996.
  10. The incident was reported in the Boston Phoenix (January 10, 1984), New York Times (January 12, 1984), and Washington Post (January 13, 1984).
  11. Letter to the Editor, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 1999.
  12. Edward Said, "Israel-Palestine: A Third Way," Le Monde Diplomatique (Aug-Sep 1998).

 

* * *

Justus R. Weiner is an international human rights lawyer and a member of the Israel and New York Bar Associations. He is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and an adjunct lecturer at Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities. The complete version of the research on Edward Said (with 141 footnotes, two charts, and a photograph) is available at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/9909/weiner.html. See also letters and responses on the article in Commentary (January 2000). The author wishes to express his appreciation to Judy Shulewitz and Zev Kanter for their assistance.

Edward Said: A Contested History - Scott Sherman

(PW, September 6, 1999)

In 1991, while attending a conference of Palestinian intellectuals in London, Edward Said received word that his New York-based doctor wished to speak with him about the results of his annual physical. Reached by telephone, the doctor was evasive. "Nothing to get excited about," he said. "I'm not a child," Said insisted, "and I have a right to know." The doctor's hesitation was understandable, as Said soon learned: a routine blood test indicated that he had a rare form of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

The diagnosis transformed his life and served as the catalyst for his memoir, Out of Place, just published by Knopf. When PW visits Said in his cavernous office at Columbia University, where he is a professor of English and Comparative Literature, he has just returned from an experimental treatment at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Haggard but serene, he explains how the book, which he started while recovering from three early rounds of chemotherapy in 1994, helped to sustain him through a most difficult period.

"It gave me something to look forward to," he says. "It gave me a purpose, because I was trying to recreate an earlier world."

Said is ambivalent about the current avalanche of memoirs flooding the literary world, and he certainly never planned to write one, but the onset of the disease impelled him to proceed. "I'm not a journal keeper," he says. "It was really something that both the disease and the death of my mother in 1990 sort of stimulated. Another purpose in doing it was that I wanted my children to have something to look at." (Said has two children, Wadie, 27, and Najla, 25.)

By any measure, Edward Said is a preeminent public intellectual, a man who, since taking a doctorate in English from Harvard in 1963, has pursued a dual career: literary and cultural critic (his 1978 book, Orientalism, is among the most influential works of critical theory in the postwar period) and uncompromising defender of Palestinian rights. The former made him a celebrated figure in the tidy corridors of academe; the latter transformed Said into a political lightning rod and object of death threats, hate mail and vandalism. Today, he remains highly visible and highly controversial. For admirers like Gore Vidal, Said is "that rare sort of intellectual who is able to illuminate even the stormiest of human prospects with a serene, often revelatory, light." His critics hold a different view: an anti-Said screed published in the conservative journal Commentary in 1989 was headlined: "Professor of Terror."

As a public figure, however, Said has remained an elusive presence: eloquent, imperious, indefatigable, but also inscrutable. Out of Place brings the man into focus, chronicling the emotional minefield of his youth and capturing "an essentially lost or forgotten world, that of my early life." The memoir depicts an upwardly mobile family shuttling between Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt, while at the same time living a life of luxury -- of "tennis, noisy cardplaying, and Ping-Pong." But it was a world tipping into disaster: in 1948, when Jewish inhabitants of the former colonial mandate of Palestine established the state of Israel, Said's entire extended family was driven out of Palestine; in 1952, his father's business was wrecked in Cairo street fighting; and in the 1970s, the family's long-time vacation spot, in the Lebanese mountains, was obliterated in the Lebanese civil war.

Recently, however, the details of Said's early life have been sharply questioned. Writing in the September issue of Commentary, Justus Reid Weiner, an Israeli scholar, challenged Said's contention that he was raised and schooled in and subsequently displaced from Palestine in the period leading up to Israel's birth -- a contention, wrote Weiner, that has served as a "powerfully compelling metaphor for the larger Palestinian condition."

Weiner's three-year investigation turned up no references to Said's parents in pre-1948 telephone directories and no references to Edward Said in the leather-bound registry books for St. George's preparatory school, where Said claimed to have been a student. As for the Jerusalem house where the family reportedly resided, Weiner found that it was registered to Said's relatives, not to his parents. "Jerusalem, it turns out," Weiner concludes, "was not the soul and center of Edward Said's youth."

In a blistering riposte published in London's al-Hayat and Cairo's al-Ahram Weekly, Said retorted, "It is part of the Palestinian fate always to be required to prove one's existence and history!" Had Weiner properly consulted Out of Place, Said wrote, he would have ascertained that the family divided its time between Jerusalem, Cairo and Lebanon in the years before 1948. In response to Weiner's accusations, Said affirmed that "the family house [in Jerusalem] was in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our families were one in ownership"; asserted that the records for St. George's school ended in 1946, a year before he enrolled; and, finally, accused Weiner of never bothering to contact him, and of threatening his relatives. "What he cannot understand," Said wrote, "is that I have been moved to defend the refugees' plight precisely because I did not suffer and therefore felt obligated to relieve the suffering of my people." But the real agenda of Commentary's editorial board, Said tells PW, is far more insidious. "If they can prove that the leading Palestinian intellectual is a liar, what d s this say about the rest of the Palestinians?"

But some facts are beyond dispute. Said was born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem in 1935. His father, Wadie Said, founded the largest office equipment and stationery business in the Middle East. Said likens his childhood to "a gigantic cocoon," and some of the best passages in Out of Place are those that describe his parents and the tightly regulated universe they created for their precocious son and other four children, a universe imbued with British colonial attitudes, upper-class Egyptian habits and Horatio Alger ideology imported from the U.S. by Wadie. While his mother fussed over her children, and his father retreated into a private realm of commerce and card games, young Edward underwent a strict regimen of "piano lessons, gymnastics, Sunday School, riding classes, boxing," augmented by lazy afternoons reading Shakespeare and tuning in to BBC opera programs.

Yet reality interrupted his idyllic childhood, and the memoir, which unfolds against the backdrop of Britain's retreat from Egypt, contains radiant portraits of individuals who stirred his conscience, among them, his aunt Nabiha, who worked tirelessly on behalf of the broken Palestinian refugees in Cairo and who, Said says, "was interested in cultivating in me some sense of the Palestinian tragedy," and a family acquaintance, Farid Haddad, whose political outspokenness resulted in his arrest, torture and execution by the authoritarian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Said's sense of displacement was reinforced by his youthful experiences in the U.S. In 1948, the family passed several tense months at the Commodore Hotel in New York while Wadie Said underwent kidney surgery. To relieve the burden, Edward was dispatched to summer camp in Maine, where his theft of a hot dog led to a traumatic confrontation with a counselor. In 1951, Said enrolled at the Mount Hermon boarding school in Massachusetts, which initially struck him as a kind of Siberian exile. Later, despite his Ivy League education and his meteoric rise to intellectual stardom, Said never lost his sense of rootlessness and dislocation, a sentiment that gives the memoir its title and its principal theme. "I was quite confused as to where one belonged," Said says.

A Life in Print

In spite of his illness, Said maintains a frenetic schedule. On the afternoon PW comes to visit, Said, a skilled pianist and music critic, is preparing to fly to Weimar, where, alongside Yo-Yo Ma and the Israeli composer Daniel Barenboim, he will lead a workshop for a group of young musicians from the Middle East. As a writer, Said remains astonishingly productive: In addition to a slew of recent essays, he is putting the finishing touches on a new collection of essays, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, which Pantheon will publish in the spring of 2000 and The Edward Said Reader, which Vintage will release in the fall of the same year. (Said's hefty backlist remains active: he recently signed contracts for Israeli, Estonian, Hungarian and Bulgarian editions of Orientalism, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 31 languages.)

Said speaks warmly about his colleagues in the publishing world. Orientalism, which came out in 1978, was published by Pantheon's André Schiffrin. But when Said, on the recommendation of friends like Christopher Hitchens, left his long-time agent, Georges Borchardt, for Andrew Wylie, he also migrated to Knopf. ("I wanted more money," Said admits.)

These days, he works closely with Shelley Wanger of Pantheon, who, while editing Interview in the late 1980s, published Said's Q&A with Yasir Arafat -- one of the first sympathetic portraits of Arafat to appear in the U.S. media. He also collaborates with an English editor, Frances Coady, who, Said notes with dismay, was recently "made redundant" by Granta Books. He is on excellent terms with Knopf's Sonny Mehta, whom he refers to in the acknowledgments as "a rare publisher and comrade." Said is especially grateful that Mehta, along with Grand Street editor Jean Stein, hosted a private screening in New York for his 1998 BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine, a turn of events that led, eventually, to the film's acceptance by Channel 13 in New York.

Readers looking for Said's analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations will not find it in Out of Place. The memoir concludes with his graduation from Harvard in 1963, and one can easily imagine a companion volume covering Said's political awakening in the late 1960s, his road to academic fame, his 14 years on the Palestine National Council, his meetings with high-ranking U.S. government officials, his tumultuous relationship with Yasir Arafat and his behind-the-scenes account of the protracted struggle for Palestinian self-determination. "I have no plans to write that book," Said says. "I feel I've written so much about politics, and I would have to sort through all of it. That's enough of a record of what I want to say. Also, I don't really trust my memory. I'm OD'd on politics."

These days, much of Said's time and energy is given over to combating what he refers to in Out of Place as "an intransigent, treacherous leukemia, which ostrichlike I try to banish from my mind entirely." Said explains: "I had a temporary remission. The bad news is that the disease is coming back. The question is, what does one do now?"

Said may be weary of politics, but he continues working tenaciously on behalf of the unpopular cause to which he has dedicated half his life. We learn from Out of Place that Said's ongoing engagement with Palestine left his parents profoundly troubled. "You're a literature professor," Wadie Said pleaded. "Stick to that." His last words to his son a few hours before he died were: "I'm worried about what the Zionists will do to you. Be careful." Said's mother was equally skeptical of political engagement. "It will ruin you," she proclaimed.

All these years later, has it ruined him, or has it enriched him? "Unquestionably enriched me," Said replies. "Unquestionably. It has brought me a great deal in the way of insight, in the way of human enrichment of the spirit, and put me in contact with real people doing real things and suffering real crises. The fact that a lot of Palestinians think of me as somebody who has helped them is the greatest honor that I could be paid."