My Path From Middle East to Midwest Has Lots of Stepping Stones

By Marilyn Raschka

They placed their bets. Friends in Lebanon wagered I would last six weeks in mellow small-town Midwestern America after living 25 years in bad big-city Beirut. Now, six months later and well settled into "Mellowtown," America, I wish I could collect on those wagers.

It's not that my friends in Beirut don't know me. It's just that they don't know how fate follows me around like a shadow. Let this story be a lesson to them all.

First of all, in the nomenclature department, I confess to living 19 miles from Lebanon. Lebanon, Wisconsin is a city divided into Old Lebanon and New Lebanon, not by sectarian political rivalry but by the coming of the railroad in the last century. That was when the younger, more entrepreneurial types packed up and moved a mile up the road to establish a new community that could feed into and off of the iron horse. Today the communities do have a "sectarian" rivalry. Their two Lutheran churches are from two different synods.

The two tiny burgs share a post office. It is from there that I occasionally mail letters to friends in the original Lebanon—often post cards of cows that bear hand-canceled proof that the card was mailed from Lebanon. The postmaster knows me and when I can't drive down to do the mailings we have an agreement that I bulk mail him my letters and he takes it from there.

Wisconsin's greatest gift to American culture (other than cheese curds and the Green Bay Packers) is the Friday night fish fry. This tradition is faithfully observed in Lebanon at a locally famous restaurant called Home Plate Inn.

Two constant cronies, nicknamed Norm and Cliff after the tavern regulars in the TV series "Cheers," have their designated spots at the bar. They and the bartender greet me with great warmth and announce to all who are gathered for a bit of cheer, "Here's the lady from the real Lebanon." Then sound effects and gestures follow that are more reminiscent of an encounter between Al Capone and Chicago's finest than life in Beirut during its less than finest days. But the spirit is there and the welcome is always warm.

In the down category was learning of the business failure of two Lebanese-born Palestinians who ran one of the best family restaurants in town. When I was home in 1993 and 1994 the business still flourished and I would spend hours "talking Lebanon" with the two.

But again fate showed its happy face one night, just after I had moved into an apartment in Hartford. Realizing I had nothing to drink or eat, I walked to a nearby gas station-cum-convenience store. As I was sorting through the various percentages of milk—a cultural challenge with which I still struggle—I heard the person in charge talking to a customer. His non-native accent sounded very familiar.

A Familiar Accent

With milk and other essentials in hand I went to the counter and said, "If you don't mind my asking, what is your native language?"

"'I'm from Palestine." came the proud answer.

Fawzi's father, whom I was to meet in the coming days, is from a West Bank town near Ramallah. Fawzi and his brother were born and raised in Abu Dhabi.

I see them every day, either to get gas or do some photocopying or just to say hello. When I run out of burghul (bulgur wheat) or sumac, an important spice in Lebanese cooking, I go to the Brothers Two and it's arranged.

When I first got home in April, I took a trip down to Chicago to see friends, very special friends for whom I arranged the adoption of a Lebanese child in 1989.

The now six-year-old's kindergarten class at the University of Chicago's Lab School was busy with a project that the parents wanted me to see. The teacher, using these two parents who are professors of archaeology as sources, found a spot on campus that was once a home—long ago removed to provide more campus green space.

With parental guidance from the two archaeologists, the kindergarten class learned the fundamentals of archaeology and applied them to the spot. Old pennies were found, along with bottles from the 1950s— artifacts that were old for this class of five- and six-year-olds who worked with the basic tools used by all archaeologists.

The day I attended the class was the day the dig site was to be covered up, but not before the children signed their names and put them with information about the dig in a big plastic soft-drink bottle to be buried at the site.

I was introduced to the class as the person who brought Felicia all the way from Lebanon to her parents. Half an hour later, at the dig site, a classmate of Felicia's turned to her and said, "I wonder who brought me to my mother."

Back in Hartford I was chatting with the head of a new bank in town. When Beirut came up she said, "My father was a Pan Am pilot and flew Beirut in the late '60s and the early '70s. He loves that city." I told her to thank him for being such a good pilot, as I usually flew Pan Am in those years.

We promised to get together after the holidays to continue our reminiscences.

After I bought a used car and set up insurance through a friend's company, I got to talking to his assistant, a woman named Dee. Having overheard me speaking about Lebanon she offered this: "You know, my mother's father came from Syria." She had no idea that the name Attiyeh is one of the oldest and best-known Christian names going. Ethnic pride was planted on the spot, along with her promise to get more information from her mother.

My string of Middle East links just kept growing, and one of the finest turned up at a friend's rummage sale. The older woman had solicited help from me and from another woman I knew only slightly. We were talking during a lull and she told me that in years past she had sponsored a Palestinian child in Lebanon through the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, for whose magazine I write.

She talked about how Rifaat would send letters and drawings—one of which she thought was his impression of a fireworks display. On second look she realized that it represented shell fire and tracer bullets.

I promised her that when I returned to Lebanon—in early 1996—I would look him up.

Nomenclature of a sort showed up again at a holiday get-together with a couple of friends. We headed out for an area restaurant with a good reputation but poor directions. Back and forth we traipsed on snow-packed County Trunk K, retracing our steps without finding the place.

Finally we stopped to ask for help. With new directions in hand we found it easily. The friend who was driving said, " This is a hegira, or however you pronounce it," looking to me for the correct rendition.

Hegira indeed—like my unconscious quest to find bits and pieces of the Middle East now so deeply imbedded in the mosaic of the American Middle West.

Marilyn Raschka, a teacher and free-lance journalist in Beirut, has for many years written the Washington Report's "Letter From Lebanon." She returned to Wisconsin in 1995 to be near her aging parents.