PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 122

Zaatar: thyme with a secret mix of herbs
for reading, writing and arithmetic lessons. The deal
was accepted, the kid was motivated and learned fast.
When the First World War broke out, Abdel Ra’uf
joined the Ottoman army. At the end of the war, the
two brothers opened their own little shop together and
earned the trust of important Syrian and Egyptian
merchants.
After the war, in 1920, Palestine found itself under
the British mandate. The town attracted an essentially
male workforce, coming from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon,
to build the roads and expand the railway network
which was to become the lynchpin of the British strat-
egy in the region. It would eventually link up all the
big cities under their control, from Haifa to Baghdad,
from the Suez Canal to Khartoum via Cairo. 9
The two brothers, with the help of some cousins and
businessmen, then invested their capital in a cigarette
120
Memories of 1948
factory which, in 1925, took the name Qaraman, Dik
& Salti. 10 Most of the villages in Galilee grew tobacco,
and the brothers bought their output. Within a few
years, the Palestinian cigarettes Mabruk, Victory,
Friend and Ottoman, and Ajami tobacco were sold
throughout the region. The factory was considered the
largest in Palestine.
In the 1930s, Taher and Abdel Ra’uf bought a huge
piece of land on Sirkin Street in Haifa, which divided
the Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods (Hadar HaKar-
mel). They had a large, four-storey stone house built
there and they moved in with their family – their three
sisters being married and living with their husbands’
families. Every morning I saw my father and my uncle
respectfully kiss their mother’s hand before going to
work. Uncle Taher would have four wives and eight
children, my father married only once and my mother