Alixa Naff: Transmitting the Past to Future Generations

by Janet McMahon

Anyone who has engaged in genealogical research knows the special thrill of discovering original documents and photographs portraying the life of one’s fore- bears. The chance to touch something they touched, see what they saw or, perhaps, how they were seen—has a unique power and immediacy.

For Dr. Alixa Naff, archivist of the Naff Arab American Collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC—and herself the daughter of Syrian-Lebanese immigrants—her “forebears” have expanded to include virtually an entire generation of Arabs who first came to this country around the turn of the century.

Indeed, a visitor to Naff at the Archives Center, currently located at the National Museum of American History, cannot fail to be impressed with her familiarity, keen interest in and affection for the people whose life stories she has documented and preserved. Despite the collection’s size—it currently comprises some 500 artifacts and over 120 cubic feet of materials, including 450 oral history interviews and more than 2,000 photos—Naff readily recognizes the individuals whose lives it chronicles and delights in tracing their family histories down to the present. One encounters, for example, Sana and Amer Kadash, well-known singers of the late ’40s and ’50s, who left all of their papers with Naff, and the Damours of Norfolk, VA, who invented the ice cream cone. One of the Damours’ descendants, I learned, has been elected to the state legislature.

Naff’s journey of discovery began more than 30 years ago, in 1962. She was then a senior in college, having decided to get her B.A. degree after a successful administrative career in private industry. “Immigration” being the topic of a paper she was required to write for an American history seminar, Naff chose Arabs in America as her subject. The paper, she later recalled, was “based on conversations with my parents’ friends, because there was little on library shelves.” To her surprise, it piqued the interest of her professor, who offered her a grant to collect Arab folklore.

That summer, with $1,000, a tape recorder, and a Volkswagen bug as transportation, Naff visited 16 communities in the U.S. and eastern Canada. Her informants were all at least 60 years old at the time, the last surviving members of her parents’ pioneering immigrant generation. Recalling that “summer of discovery” in a 1985 article in Arab Perspectives, Naff tells how, “in mining their minds for folklore, I discovered the mother lode of Arab life histories, a record of the vitality of their ethnic life in America. Their experiences and their delight in relating them…fascinated and captivated me.”

After completing her fieldwork, Naff went on to earn her master’s and Ph.D. degrees. (“I have a Ph.D.; I ask questions,” she informed me.) She became a university professor, teaching at California State University, Chico and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She left teaching in 1977 when, as she describes it, “anti-Arab feeling was at a pitch,” and she could not get an answer—from The Washington Post, The New York Times, or from members of Congress—to one of her questions: “Where are you getting your information about Arab Americans?” She discovered there was no source of information to counter the anti-Arab stereotyping and propaganda then rampant.

Naff came to Washington, DC in 1977 to serve as a consultant for a documentary film on Arabs in America, and later wrote the entry on Arabs for the Harvard Encyclopedia on American Ethnic Groups. Impelled by memories of her original research 15 years earlier (“I…reflected on the libraries and artifacts I had seen…[and] recalled the number of times I had been told, ‘If only you had come before we moved…’ or ‘We threw that old stuff out after my parents died.’”), Naff began her study on the history of Arab immigrants.

“Someone,” Naff relates, “directed me to Msgr. Gino Baroni,” then undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and founder of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. His center helped her secure funding for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities and provided an office where Naff wrote the book that resulted: Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience.

While researching her book, Naff “collected 99 percent of the material” for her archives. In 1984 Richard Ahlborn, curator of the Smithsonian’s Community Life Division (now its Department of Cultural Affairs), convinced Naff to donate the collection to the Smithsonian in honor of her parents, Faris and Yanna Naff, and their generation of immigrants to America.

Knowing that the sources of the information and artifacts she had collected were fast disappearing, Naff attached certain conditions to her gift: the collection was to be preserved, expanded, made accessible to students and scholars, and exhibited periodically. The Smithsonian accepted these conditions. It soon became apparent, however, that there was no one to ensure that they were met. So, taking matters into her own hands, the donor offered to become the archivist of her collection, if someone would “teach me to archive.” The Smithsonian accepted that offer as well, and Alixa Naff has been “volunteering” there ever since.

For most of those years she has worked alone. About a year ago, however, she began to attract some “wonderful” volunteers who she calls her “dream team,” adding, “I have to start believing in miracles.” One day an Egyptian scholar walked in and began abstracting the Arabic materials in the archives. Soon thereafter, an Algerian friend from graduate school dropped by, and decided to help while looking for a job. These and others, including “a little Italian lady I love,” will soon be moving on, however, and Dr. Naff will once again face her daunting task alone. One gets the distinct impression, though, that she herself remains undaunted.

When not working in her currently cramped quarters—the collection is scheduled to be moved to a new location within the Archives Center—Naff gives slide lectures at universities and other venues around the country. In the past, these lectures have resulted in exciting connections and discoveries. Once, while giving a lecture in Mobile, AL, Naff used a slide of an old photograph of a Birmingham peddler. Unbeknownst to her, that peddler’s niece was in the audience and recognized the photograph of her uncle. “We have his peddler’s pack,” she told Naff, and that pack is now part of the Naff collection.

Also part of the collection is a brown spiral-bound notebook with Arabic writing. It is the story of Faris Naff who, like most of the early generation of Arab immigrants to America, was a peddler, and told stories about his experiences to his children, including Alixa, around the dinner table. His wife, Alixa’s mother, died at a young age, and following her death the family moved to California.

Her father remained in “deep mourning,” Naff remembers, and, in an effort to lift his spirits, she suggested he write his life story, which is contained in that notebook. After she returned to school and learned classical Arabicas opposed to what she calls the “kitchen Arabic” she learned as a childNaff was able to translate her father’s story, which began, “My father died in 1872 and left my mother with nothing.”

Dr. Alixa Naff’s life work—her research, books (including one for children), and, of course, the collection itself—not only reveals the lives and culture of a specific immigrant group, that of Arabs—mostly Christian—from Syria/Lebanon at the turn of the century. It teaches us about America itself and what has made it what it is today. As such, it is a dynamic and evolving resource for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds.

Indeed, one of Dr. Naff’s ambitions is to hold “a conference on immigration and assimilation which will focus on other small ethnic groups.” In the meantime, her hope for the Naff Arab American Collection is that “someone will come along and use this and write the next chapter.”