What happens when the world that creates you
is gone? In the face of war, some flee, and some
remain. The culture is transformed, of course, but
each transformation is individual. Suffering cannot
be generalized.
Once in California, my grandfather placed ads
in the newspaper, hoping to find work as a lan-
guage tutor: “Latin and French teacher, diploma of
Notre Dame des Anges, Thonon, France. 23 years
teaching in Egyptian government colleges. Two
dollars per hour.” There wasn’t an avalanche of de-
mand for his services. And he needed to support
his family somehow. So he worked the night shift
in a bakery; he loaded trucks in downtown Los
Angeles; he cleaned the floors at a fish market on
Redondo Beach; and then, finally, he managed to
land the custodial job at Universal.
Being a janitor was hard, low-paying, dirty work.
It was quite different from tutoring, and certainly
from writing—both professions that had chal-
lenged my grandfather’s mind, and spoken to the
identity that he’d worked so hard to build, through
the decades. He had a poet’s eye for beauty; now,
cut off from any means of publication, surround-
ed by yet another new culture—what hope did
he have? My grandfather had been able to thrive
in Egypt as a writer. Cairo had been, at that time,
a colonial city; it had significant contact with the
French language. But America was something
different entirely. In America, he became a writer
whose body of work would not—in his lifetime—
be shared with the world.
was a notable event for our family; our centenarian
grandfather inscribed copies for each of his twen-
ty-nine grandchildren. My copy has a short note
that he wrote to me in his shaky hand: “May you live
a life full of joy and happiness.”
But the poems—they are so sad. Particularly
sorrowful is “Retour au Pays Natal,” or “Return to
a Native Land,” which my grandfather wrote after
a return trip to Aleppo, for a single week, in 1985.
Revisiting the city of his birth for the first time in
sixty years, my grandfather decided to go to his
mother’s grave.
A distant star / Exhausts its light on the sleep of
the dead. Reading this now, I can’t help but think of
the residents of my grandfather’s birthplace, who
are living through their fragile ceasefire, facing
the task of rebuilding their city. As its population
struggled through winter, Aleppo had no water and
no electricity. The Umayyad Mosque, one of the
great treasures of the Islamic world, has been rav-
aged; its nine-hundred-year-old minaret has col-
lapsed into rubble. The eastern and central parts
of the city, especially, are lunar-looking now; they
recall Beirut during the worst of the Lebanese civil
war, or the degradation that followed the siege of
Sarajevo. “The destruction is beyond imagination,”
one U.N. official said recently. “War has changed
everything.”
Five years ago, my grandfather’s religious dis-
trict, the Melkite Greek Catholic Archeparchy of
Aleppo—which includes Idlib and al-Raqqa, both
still within the control of isis—had roughly eight-
een thousand parishioners. After years of civil war
and ethnic cleansing, Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the
Archbishop of Aleppo, struggles to be optimistic.
“We have no statistics for how many of us are still
living in the city,” he told me not long ago. “It is per-
haps half the original number. But we remain faith-
ful to the city of our forefathers.”
The day after my grandfather’s appointment
with Danny Thomas, the envelope containing his
“Poeme in English” arrived at his house, via regis-
tered mail. He had addressed it to his new, Amer-
ican self: “Philip Toutonghi.” In trying to remake
himself as a Hollywood lyricist, he had American-
ized his first name: Philip instead of Philippe. He
must have stashed the letter in a drawer, where it
remained for decades. He didn’t look at it, but he
refused to throw it away. He carried it with him as
he moved from house to house in the nineteen-fif-
ties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. I still
have it, today. The envelope has been sealed for
sixty-five years. It has never been opened. The
poem remains inside—unpublished, unseen, un-
sung, unread.
Two Kids On A Wall
Photography By Bernd Lohse
His work began to appear in Egyptian literary
journals, like Le Rayon d’Égypte, the magazine
of the French Dominican Friars in Cairo. In 1929,
he won a regional French literary prize from the
Academie des Jeux Florimontains, the certificate
for which identified him as a “Poete Franco-Egyp-
tien.” That academy also took the liberty of chang-
ing his Arabic name, altering its spelling from from
Tütünji to Toutonghi.
Six hundred miles from Aleppo, he continued to
read the newspapers from the region, daily, at the
Café Casablanca, the little restaurant across the
street from the new family home. Reports from the
Vilayet were confusing and tumultuous. My grand-
father felt safer in Cairo, especially with a growing
family. But then, on September 13, 1940, the 1st
Blackshirt Division of the Italian Army crossed the
Libyan Frontier Wire at Fort Capuzzo, and brought
the Second World War to Egypt.
In the desert outside the city, the French and
the English fought the Germans and the Italians.
The violence loomed. Italian men, including many
of my grandfather’s friends, were rounded up and
detained by the Egyptian police. And so when my
oldest aunt, Agnes, got a job as a stenographer
at Standard Oil, and, with dizzying speed, met a
young Standard Oil geologist, married him, and
moved to Los Angeles, my grandfather decided
that the rest of the family would follow. He fled
again. The Toutonghis raffled off all their pos-
sessions to pay for tickets on an ocean liner. On
May 26, 1946, they disembarked from Alexan-
dria, Egypt, on the S.S. Vulcania,