We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned, without coffin or ceremony, our hasty, untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
A Jerusalem childhood ended in April 1948: days after Deir Yassin, nine-year-old Ghada Karmi's family packed a few summer clothes and left their Qatamon home, believing they would be back within weeks.
Ghada Karmi was born in 1939 in Jerusalem and grew up in Qatamon, a prosperous, largely Christian Arab neighborhood of stone villas and leafy gardens in the west of the city. Her memoir In Search of Fatima records how that world came apart: the bombing of the nearby Semiramis Hotel by the Haganah on the night of 4–5 January 1948, the panic exodus of neighbors, and finally — days after the massacre at Deir Yassin — her father Hasan Karmi telling the family, “Your mother and all of you are leaving in the morning.” In April 1948 the family drove to Damascus, leaving behind their maid Fatima and their dog Rex, expecting a short absence. Qatamon was occupied weeks later; the family never returned, and Karmi grew up in England.
Karmi became a physician, academic and writer — a research fellow at the University of Exeter and one of the most prominent Palestinian advocates of a single democratic state. Jerusalem Story, a publication of the Jerusalem Institute for Palestine Studies, excerpted this passage from the second edition of In Search of Fatima (Verso, 2009).
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Quoted exactly as published by Jerusalem Story (excerpted from In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Verso). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Jerusalem Story (excerpted from In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Verso)