A Passion for Learning: The Life Journey of Khalil Totah, a Palestinian Quaker Educator and Activist

By Joy Totah Hilden

Khalil Totahs life spanned the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate in Palestine, and the foundation of the state of Israel. His passion for education drove him to leave his native Palestine for the US in 1906 to complete his education, which culminated in a PhD from Columbia University. His next adventure, in France during World War I, was followed by a return to Palestine with a beautiful American wife.

Having achieved his education and successfully navigated life transitions, he set out to serve as principal of a teacher-training college in Jerusalem. Later he became principal of the Friends Boys School in Ramallah, the Quaker school that had taught and mentored him. In spite of work-related struggles and a family tragedy, he built and developed the school throughout the Arab Peasant Revolt and the British Mandate. He was esteemed and venerated by his people for his leadership.

In 1944, Khalil and his family returned to the US, where he continued his career in education as director of the Arab information office in New York. He lectured, wrote, and became an activist on behalf of the Palestinians as partition was debated at the UN.

Told by his daughter, the story of Khalils life sheds light on the history of Palestine of that period and of the Quakers in Palestine. His journal, diaries, articles, photographs, and her mothers letters to family in the US have formed the foundation for this story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524551889

Joy Totah Hilden

About the Author A Passion for Learning by Joy Totah Hilden Joy Totah Hilden was born in 1935 in Jerusalem to a Palestinian father and an American mother, both Quakers. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a child of nine years. Joys Arab heritage has deeply affected her outlook and pursuits and laid the foundation for her deep interest in Arab culture. She graduated with honors from the San Francisco Art Institute with a bachelors of fine arts degree in 1958 and received general and special secondary teaching credentials in 1964 from San Francisco State University. She taught art and English in secondary schools for eighteen years, continuing to practice fine and textile art. From 1982 to 1994, Joy and her husband lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where he taught at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. During that time, she did independent primary research in Bedouin weaving, traveling throughout the kingdom and surrounding countries. The resulting book, Bedouin Weaving of Saudi Arabia and Its Neighbours, was published in 2010 by Arabian Publishing Ltd. in London. Since returning from Arabia, she has focused on speaking about Bedouin weaving, organizing her familys archives, and writing this biography of her father.

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Copyright © 2016 by Joy Totah Hilden.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2016917257

ISBN:                      Hardcover                      978-1-5245-5190-2

                                Softcover                        978-1-5245-5189-6

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Rev. date: 12/15/2017

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Endorsements

Chapter 1: The Loss of My Father,

Chapter 2: The Early Years

Ramallah

The Religious Society of Friends in Ramallah, 1867 to 1944

Growing Up: Family, Childhood, and Youth, 1886 to 1911

School

Brummana, Lebanon

Becoming Manly

Going to America

Oak Grove Seminary

Clark College

Starting a Family, 1930 to 1935

Chapter 3: Palestine in Turmoil, 1929 to 1945

Eyewitness to the Arab Revolt and World War II, 1936 to 1939

The Royal Commission, 1937

Deaths in the Family

Back to Work: The Revolt Intensifies

The White Paper

A Young American Teacher

World War II

Respite at the Gazan Bayara, Our Orange Grove, 1934 to 1948

A Visit to the Mukhtar of Herbia, April 8, 1943 or Herbia Modafeh

Administrative History: Closing Ties with Ramallah Friends Schools 1927 to 1944

Chapter 4: Life in the United States

Chapter 5: The Whittier Years, 950 - 1955

General Views on the Middle East

Chapter 6: Aftermath

Khalil Totah’s Legacy

Epilogue

Our Family’s Experiences as Immigrants

A Letter to My Father

End Notes

Appendix

Bibliography

Foreword

The story of Dr. Khalil Totah (1886–1955) is a story of a people during momentous social and political transformations in an area known to generations of Arab Christians and Muslims as Bilad al-Sham (Geographic Syria). It is a story of the hopes and aspirations of all Syrians before they splintered into disparate nationalities as Palestinians, Syrians from Syria proper, Lebanese, and Jordanians. Totah was born and grew up in Palestine, but he was destined to play a role in articulating a sense of collective Syrian peoplehood, and did so precisely when Arabs awakened from centuries of Ottoman domination to contemplations of modernity that swept the region at the close of the nineteenth century. He lived the euphoria of imagining a democratic nation as part of a thriving Arab World, but also lived through the advent of British and French occupations shortly after World War I, and the imposition of the current political map by these European powers. His critiques of Ottoman decay evolved—within a kind of prototype Arab American space—into a considerable challenge against British and Zionist designs, before he lived through the dejection and bitterness of the Palestinians’ expulsion in 1948 and the creation of Israel. Promoting formal education in Palestine, mentoring generations of intellectuals, and schooling Westerners over the course of his entire life on the history and culture of his people were his responses to the calamities befalling Palestine and the Arab World. His vision and hopes of reforms and self-determination at the start of the past century accompanied him across the waters to the United States where he left an indelible mark on Arab American history with political advocacy.

The importance of Khalil Totah in Arab American historiography is matched by the need for this insightful introspective by Joy Totah, his daughter. It is easy to understand Joy’s desire to understand her father as she seeks to honor his memory, because Totah was consumed by serving communities spread over three continents. He was the contemporary of, and worked with, seminal personalities, among them author Ameen al-Rihani, Professor Philip Hitti, Elia Madey, Nasib Arida, and the indefatigable activists Fuad Shatara and Habib Katibah on this side of the waters. His scholarship and tireless work on behalf of his homelands bridge many of the above with equally renowned leaders who opposed the Turks, the British, and French, and went on to fend against the onslaught of Zionism, among them: the Mufti Hajj Amin and Jamal Husseini, Aouni Abdelhadi, and Saleh al-Bargouthy, among others. His transnational advocacy took many forms and earned him a place alongside these national leaders. Totah drew attention to the perils of partitioning Palestine at a pivotal moment. He was instrumental in forging a working relationship between Arab Americans and Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Jewish Committee, Harvard Professor William Hocking, Dean of Barnard College Virginian Gildersleeve, and Rabbi Judah Magness toward the ends of equality and dignified life for Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

Joy’s recollections of her father drawn from the family’s archives are timely and invaluable service to the largely historiography-impoverished and biography-impoverished Arab American studies. The gathering studies on Arab Americans seldom rely on manuscripts and tend to lean toward postmodern renditions of identities and gender from western perspectives. Khalil’s life and times, as those of his contemporaries—including women—have yet to be woven into a more coherent story of the first sixty years of the Arab immigration; of the Syrian nationalist movement, indeed, the transnational aspects of once potent and coherent political and intellectual alignment between the diasporas and the leadership. Rigorous and mutually beneficial exchanges between Americans and Syrians have equally been neglected. It is no surprise that Khalil possessed a deep sense of loyalty to his adopted country, the US. His Quaker upbringing combined with keen awareness of his Arab roots accounts for Totah’s commitment to reforms and democracy for countrymen, first in Syria, later in Palestine, but always within a pan-Arab context. His visions endured severe challenges and emerged unchanged through the Nakbah of 1948. Indeed, my research shows that Khalil Totah presided over a period when the interests of Arabs and Arab Americans converged, thus bringing the latter closer to the center of power than any time in the diaspora’s history before or since.

I first learned about Dr. Totah from correspondences belonging to Ameen Farah (1888–1975), a supporter of the Institute of Arab American Affairs (1944–1950) living in Flint, Michigan, when Totah was the organization’s executive director. I soon became convinced of the contiguity and staggering importance inherent in studying the lives and experiences of Totah and his comrades. But the discovery of these manuscripts and learning as much as I can about the breadth of their experiences exposed the full tragedy of Palestine. Joy discloses, based on the manuscripts in her possession and published accounts relying on these manuscripts, vivid descriptions of the brutality of British reprisals against largely defenseless populations in Palestine. Here’s how Eva Marshall Totah, Khalil’s wife, described the scene during the Great Palestinian Revolt in 1936:

From the tower room of the Boys’ School, we watched a British attack on nearby Arab villagers … . The British planes swooped down on the people as they sped along the open roads, and literally mowed them down. Thus did Britain deal with the Arab population, whom in her League of Nations’ Mandate she was bound to protect.

Once in the USA to finally take on his responsibilities as the institute’s director, Totah, who was no stranger to the business of educating Western audiences, picked up where his compatriots left off: the men and women of the Arab National League founded by Fuad Shatara as a result of the Palestinian revolt of 1936 rallied around the institute, turning it into the most sophisticated formal Arab American political organization in the immigrants’ history. I’ll never forget the intensity, excitement, and deep gratitude I felt toward Joy and her husband, Robert Hilden, for making available to me some 3,000 documents relating to the institute. My modest inquiry is no substitute for a book-length study on the Institute of Arab American Affairs.

This biography of Khalil Totah by his daughter Joy is, most of all, a piece of a large neglected puzzle on our own terms as descendants of dispossessed Palestinians. Gathering racism and intolerance combined with ever creeping ignorance of the Arabs’ history, culture, and religions are exacerbated by the absence of repositories and solid research. Part of this regression is that Arabic-language works by Totah’s contemporaries await translation a century after publication, while Arab American organizations reel under the weight of political polarization and vanishing leadership and coherent vision. It will take concerted and responsible scholarship to write Totah, Shatara, Katibah, Faris Malouf, and many into a fuller Arab American narrative. This book is a step in that direction.

Hani J. Bawardi, PhD

Associate Professor of History

Center for Arab American Studies

University of Michigan, Dearborn

[e-mail]

The call of God, which came to him in his youth, to serve the people of his native land, was thus, not a chore, but a joy and his life’s consuming passion.

——Eva Totah

Introduction

Born and raised in the Palestinian Christian town of Ramallah in 1886, my father, Khalil Abdallah Totah, was an educator and activist who devoted his life to the education of Palestinian youth and the education of Americans about Palestine. His life spanned the late Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate period, the partition of Palestine, and the post-World War II period. In his early years, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, along with what are now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Palestine was ruled by the British Mandate. By the time of his death, it was occupied by Israel.

My father was a prominent Palestinian in his time, a man with vision and character. He also loved America and was born the same year that the Statue of Liberty was erected. He was educated in America, married an American, and proudly became a United States citizen later in life. Once in the United States, he became a leader in the Arab-American community and a bridge between it and the American public.

For many years, I had thought about writing a book about my father. I felt that it was important for his life and ideals to be known to a wide audience. My sister, Sibyl and I had talked about it before she and I became busy mothers. I always thought she would be the one to write it, but she died early, and the idea lay dormant. In 1997, I finally decided to write the biography to share with the world information about my father from my perspective.¹ Writing it became an odyssey into the history of my father’s extended family and into a large volume of archival material left by my parents. In the process, I have become immersed in documents, diaries, manuscripts, letters, articles, and more. I have met and interviewed treasured Palestinian relatives, friends, and colleagues of my father. I have met and shared information with several historians, whose writing and analysis have enriched my understanding of my father. I have become increasingly fascinated with family events and experiences that as a child I was only aware of in a shadowy form—in small, easy, child-sized pieces. Information has revealed itself in increments, like in an archaeological dig.

As I learn more about my father and my Palestinian heritage, I feel a stronger desire to continue the work my father started and find a sense of completion and peace that my father, due to the loss of his homeland, was never able to completely grasp.

I owe a large debt to my Midwestern American Quaker mother, Eva Marshall Totah, who wrote letters frequently from Palestine to her family and friends in the United States from the time she arrived as a teacher at the Friends School. These original letters and carbon copies now constitute a sizeable file, much of which is published in From Prairie to Palestine: The Eva Marshall Totah Story by Lyla Ann May. As a newcomer to Palestine, her early letters were full of wonder and enthusiasm for a culture she hadn’t known existed. She said that she had thought the inhabitants of the land of the Bible were all Jews, as in ancient times. She had many stories to tell of her students at the Friends’ Girls’ School in Ramallah, of local traditions, of weddings and trips to the countryside. She often spoke of Dr. and the first Mrs. Totah, Ermina. As time went on, her letters told of the death of Ermina, and later, of Eva’s desire to accept Dr. Totah’s marriage proposal and to stay in Ramallah. During their one-year engagement, she reasoned with her family’s pleas for her to come home, extolled my father’s personal virtues, and arranged for him to meet her parents while he was in the US on a fundraising trip. Then came letters about their marriage on the Mount of Olives, of the arrival of we three children, and of daily events at home and school. Political struggles and violence were recorded from her perspective.

My mother’s family prized her letters and saved them so that her descendants would be able to learn about her life. Her father was eager for anything in print that he could have published in the Wessington Springs, South Dakota, paper, so Mother sometimes wrote pieces specifically for that purpose. She kept five-year diaries throughout the 1930s and ’40s, with brief notes on events of the day. My father’s diaries were more like open-ended journals, irregular but narrative in style. After my maternal grandfather died in June 1937, fewer letters were saved, likewise after Grandmother died in August 1942. The letters to her family form the basis of much of this book. From that date on, the only records I could find until Father’s diary in 1935 (except for a few entries in 1930) and Mother’s in 1930 are some of Mother’s letters home.

In addition to diaries, Mother kept documents related to many events in our family. In my searches for information, I found files full of letters and articles that made my writing of this book much easier. In fact, as I read letters written by my father during the Arab revolt in 1936 and other letters written to my mother during a trip to the Middle East in 1952, I felt that these documents should tell the story and would not need much writing by me. I credit my mother for typing up some of these letters and documents, filing them and keeping them safe through many moves: from Ramallah to Massachusetts, to New Jersey, to Whittier, California, and finally to the San Francisco Bay Area. I am grateful that they were not lost on the docks after our arrival by Liberty ships in 1944 during a dockworkers’ strike.

Unfortunately, not all records were kept. Letters between my parents during their courtship are absent. Only a few letters from Ermina to Khalil survived, and almost none from Khalil to Ermina. My father kept diaries, but on his own he seems not to have kept track of letters. He did, however, keep a journal, which covers memories of his childhood in Ramallah, his schooling under the Friends (Quakers), his youth, and his emigration to the United States to continue his schooling. The journal was written in large sections during several periods of his youth, looking back and realizing that what he had lived through was worthy of recording. His journal and diaries seem written with awareness that people would read them in the future; he was careful not to include anything too personal. He tells us of his romantic reaction to meeting his future first wife but gives no personal information of that sort later on, not even after they were married.

Another type of data that was missing in his journal and diaries was detailed information about Father’s family members. There were originally eleven children in his family in Ramallah, and there is scant record of them, their families, and their lives. He seemed to move out of the microcosm of Ramallah and its very close, traditional ties into the macrocosm of his adopted country, the United States. But he kept his vision on educating and advocating for Palestinian youth, adjusting to life in the United States, and speaking out about the plight of the Palestinians whose land was freed from the Ottoman Empire only to be occupied by Britain and then given away without their consent to another occupier and colonizer, Israel.

One important part of his life, when he was director of the Institute of Arab American Affairs in New York from 1950 to 1955, is only partially documented outside official papers relating to the UN. In his book The Making of Arab Americans … (University of Texas, 2014), Hani Bawardi devotes a chapter to the institute, incorporating the few surviving correspondences relating to the institute supported by scatterings of similar material from other collections. He made wide use of our family archives in the book. Many materials from the office are not in our possession. Khalil wrote a document entitled My Four and a Half Years in New York (see Appendix) with a table of contents that includes more chapters than we have available. Either he never completed the report or it is missing. Since my mother typed it up and included it in a typed version of his journal without all the chapters, I suspect he never completed it.

The archives include many photographs of my father, including a few from his childhood in Ramallah, his school days in Maine at age twenty, personal family pictures, and professional photographs with school, students, and faculty. The file also includes government documents and research materials from his Middle East trip in 1952.

My father died in 1955. In 1971, Mother arranged to give his library and papers to the University of Washington’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature. The chairman of the department, Farhat Ziadeh, had been a student of Father and later served as a founding member of the board of the Institute of Arab American Affairs. Mother was preparing to move and was not able to keep all of the materials, and she wanted them to be of use. The room in which the collection was kept was named the Khalil Totah Library.

In the mid-1990s, I visited the Khalil Totah Library for the first time. Shortly thereafter, in 1997, I decided to write a biography of my father. Farhat Ziadeh, by that time emeritus from the University of Washington, volunteered to turn over the boxes of documents, manuscripts, and photographs to me permanently since I needed their contents for my research. They have been invaluable.

To further my research, in July 1997, I attended a Ramallah Federation Convention in Dearborn, Michigan, where many Ramallah immigrants live. I conducted interviews with a treasure trove of elders who remembered my father. In 1998, I took a trip to the Middle East, looking up and interviewing people in Ramallah and Amman, Jordan, where many took refuge during the wars. Also in 1998, I visited and interviewed Graham Leonard in Washington, DC. He had lived for many years in Palestine, where he served as pastor of the Ramallah Friends Meeting (after 1955 and again in the 1980s). He had also lived in Lebanon and was fluent in Arabic. Though Leonard never met my father, he knew him by reputation, which lived on long after Father left Palestine. Leonard’s knowledge of the culture and the people and his amazing memory gave me a rich background of information.

Another man of towering intellect and an amazing memory whom I interviewed was historian and author Nicola Ziadeh (no relation to Farhat Ziadeh). Ziadeh was a student of my father at the Arab College in Jerusalem, a teacher training school. He maintained contact with Father for the rest of his life. In April of 2003, I traveled to Lebanon to interview Nicola in Beirut. He was ninety-four years old and could remember every detail of his life and his association with my father.

But by far the most information I have unearthed has been in our own family’s archives. I am constantly amazed at the amount of material I have inherited—such a gift from my parents! More files continue to reveal themselves as time goes on. The task of prioritizing and choosing what to use in this book has been daunting. I decided to present as much as possible my parents’ own writing, and have incorporated many of their letters, journal and diary entries, and articles. While historical events are introduced and discussed to put my father’s life in context, in-depth historical or political analysis is not the focus of the book.

My father was working on a book at the time that he died. The unpublished manuscript, entitled Palestine Illustrates the Bible, is summarized in the Appendix with my commentary. Citations were not given for quotes from the manuscript because it was in rough condition and was never published. The manuscript’s present-tense voice refers to the time of his writing it in the early 1950s. Father used the following notations after Bible quotes: SRV = Standard Revised Version; KJV = King James Version.

I am the youngest of three children, nineteen years old when my father died and just beginning to know him as an adult. His guidance and love were snatched from me too soon. He was not there when I got the scholarship to art school, when I married and had children; not there when I needed him through years of struggle. Writing this book is my way of knowing him and his life and times more deeply; a way of honoring his life. Perhaps it is one way of grieving. I hope this biography will contribute to an appreciation of who my father was and the contributions he made to Palestinian education and political awakening. I also hope that it will give the reader a personal understanding of the people, history, and politics of Palestine, and that it will shed light on the Arabs’ struggle for autonomy and respect. The process of writing the book has heightened my sense of who I am and where I came from in every sense of the word.

For those who want to research the original archival material, most of it will be held at The Quaker Collection, Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA. 19041–11392.

Joy Totah Hilden

Berkeley, California, USA

December 10, 2016

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many colleagues, relatives, and friends for their help, support, and interest in completing this book. Throughout the project, Lyla May has supported me, reading, commenting, and editing. Her help has been indispensable. I deeply thank Thomas M. Ricks for his editing of the manuscript and the contribution of his ideas from the beginning. I am indebted to Hani Bawardi for his support and insight, for his dedication to Arab American studies. Charles Malouf Samaha, the grandnephew of Father’s colleague Faris Malouf, has been generous in sharing information with me as he researched his uncle’s life and wrote about him. My cousin Nabeeh Totah read the manuscript and gave me feedback. He found areas of uncertainty about family and ferreted out answers with an expert eye for detail. Leslie Keenan and her writing class helped to encourage me in the early days of the work.

Numerous cousins and other relatives offered comments, photos, and information: Emile Moghannam, George Totah, Lucille Totah, Jane Totah Davis, Abdallah Moghannam, Juliette Totah, and others.

Several men with long memories contributed information: Nicola Ziadeh, Said Shaheen, and Graham Leonard.

Librarians at the Friends’ Girls’ School found important dates of two of Khalil’s sisters’ graduations, which helped in figuring out their birth order.

Ann Higgins created the maps of Palestine and the US. Colleen Neff took the author’s photograph.

Many friends have cheered me on throughout the long process. My heartfelt thanks go to all.

Endorsements

Joy Totah Hilden’s A Passion for Learning is an intimate biography of Khalil Totah that contributes significantly to our understanding of the educational history of Palestine during the British Mandate, and the singular role of this pioneering pedagogue. Of particular interest to historians and scholars of the Middle East is her skilful use of unpublished family papers, letters, diaries, as well as district reports, to shed light on the the schooling of a young man before WWI, and on Totah’s struggle to balance his commitment to Palestinian nationalism, with his pacifist religious beliefs during the armed rebellion of 1936–39.

Salim Tamari

The Jerusalem Quarterly

Institute for Palestine Studies

Email: [e-mail]

www.palestine-studies.org

––––––—

"Joy is an artist—and not only a ‘fine’ one. In crafting her father’s biography, she has managed to write a mural. She paints his story as Monet, with impressionistic memories of Palestine, and as Picasso, with Guernica-like recollections of the nakba." ——Rajie Cook

––––––-

I find reading Joy Totah Hilden’s biography of her late educator … and activist father comforting. It confirms to me the worth of our shared Palestinian traditional practices: The family, for example, pools its limited resources to invest in the education of a promising youth who goes forth and excels but is tethered for life to his home village, returning there regardless where his ambition takes him. The precedence Khalil Totah set is a worthy example for all Palestinian generations to study and emulate. In Joy’s account the reader gets an insider’s view of a wondrous panorama, that of the life and struggle of a pioneering Palestinian educator who was proud of who he was: My family has been Christian since the days of Christ, he boasted.

In his exemplary life Khalil Totah shouldered a double educational mission: not only did he contribute to Arab cultural and political awakening through the mentoring of generations of intellectuals in Palestine and greater Syria but also to the more demanding task of educating his fellow Americans about Palestine and its takeover by the Zionist settler colonialists.

Venerable and authentic the biography is Palestinian in more ways than one: It is shamelessly intimate, written with unfailing love, fidelity, admiration and boastfulness. And like a Palestinian village wedding it engages ever widening circles of Totahs, second, third and fourth-degree relatives and a whole slew of neighbors, friends and their friends.

Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH

Physician, civil society activist and author

Please visit and like website: chief-complaint.net

––––––-

In an eloquent and moving account Joy Totah Hilden recounts the life of her father the renowned Palestinian educator Khalil Totah, whose journey from the small peasant town Ramallah to the United States and back reflected the transformations in Palestinian society during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire and under British colonial rule. While the book speaks of a daughter’s love and pride for her father, it is also a commentary on the turbulent times Palestinians endured as they fought for self-determination and national independence. It sheds light on the important work Dr. Khalil Totah and others did to confront western imperialism and discrimination against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Totah was unwavering in his advocacy work on behalf of Palestinians even after 1948 that led to the establishment of the state of Israel and until his untimely death in 1955. He was passionate and committed to the education of Palestinians whom he saw as the foundation for a strong and independent Palestine. Relying on journals, letters, and official accounts, Hilden is able to reconstruct a vivid account of her father’s fascinating life during equally fascinating times. Her work is valuable for preserving the work of Totah and others who labored on behalf of Palestine and Palestinians from oblivion.

Faedah M. Totah

Associate Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University

Chapter 1

The Loss of My Father,

February 24, 1955

It was a blustery February day in Goleta, California, in 1955. I entered the long hall of the barracks-turned-dormitory at University of California at Santa Barbara and was greeted by my friend Mimsy, a blue-eyed, dark-haired beauty wise and experienced in the ways of the world. As she met me and walked with me down the hall of the dorm, she said, Joy, I need to talk to you. I sensed something serious. Your mother called and since you weren’t here she asked me to give you a message. That seemed odd since mother never called; I wondered what the message was. Your father died earlier today quite suddenly. I had a premonition about it. I could hardly believe it. I was numb with fear and dread, wondering how it had happened. He was only sixty-nine years old, too young to die. Mimsy stayed with me while I called Mother on the dormitory phone and tried to absorb the news. I was amazed that Mimsy had had a premonition about it.

I was apprehensive about my future and that of my mother and siblings. When I called my mother, I learned that my father had a stroke and died suddenly. Later, I learned that his last words were a quotation from the Bible, Isaiah 40:31: They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. I remember him quoting that many times. Now he was saying it as a prayer for strength and life. It was too late for prayers; he became unconscious and died soon after.

I immediately went home to Whittier and was soon joined by my sister, who flew in from Bennington College in Vermont. My brother happened to be playing bass with the Les Elgart band at the Hollywood Palladium and so was nearby. Over twenty male relatives arrived from around the state and from Texas to pay their respects and to attend the memorial for their esteemed and beloved son. Relatives and friends came from the immediate area. Telegrams were sent to the Middle East. People visited with condolences and food. Traditional dark, unsweetened Arabic coffee was served and people spoke in hushed tones. We planned the funeral.

The open-casket funeral seemed surreal to me. That body in the coffin did not look like my real father, so made-up, so pale and still. I took a look and rejected the idea that this represented him. Mother’s calm seemed unnatural. She was forever organized and on top of things. Her cousin Joy Vessey came to help, but Eva managed on a parallel path. I kept waiting for some breakdown, some show of grief, but it never came. Friends and relatives gave beautiful eulogies: Rosa Lee, a Quaker missionary who knew Father as a boy; a relative; some friends of recent years. My sister Sibyl played on the piano Father’s favorite chorale, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Mother taped the service so it could be shared with those in Ramallah. Aziz Araj, a close family friend from Ramallah, said,

You have come to a final rest after a job well done. You have walked the road of life gently but effectively until the end. In terms of accomplishment your life was long and fruitful; for as an educator you have imparted knowledge to the youth of your land, and as a leader of men you have fought for its cause. And whenever and if ever right prevails over might, then the fight you have waged in defense of your land will never be erased. Yes, and the work you have done and the services you have accomplished will be measured indeed as the work and services of a great man. For you have always been to us, your students and your friends, the great man that you are. As you are a sponsor or a spark of inspiration which ignited the fire of the willingness to learn throughout the Near East.

Ann Upton, who knew Father from the Friends Church in Whittier, where our family had lived for the past five years, spoke of him as a happy man:

In the years that I knew Khalil Totah, each time we had an occasion to meet, it was a happy occasion. (Some of these times were times of study and meditation, other times were planned as happy occasions.) But whatever their purpose, Khalil had a light touch and a spirit of happiness. It wasn’t, I’m sure, that Khalil felt that he knew all the answers, because his mind was full of questions and his problems reached around the world. But his questions and his problems never shut out his spirit of happiness.

His friend Bill Weiler said,

. . . He, [too] was proud of his Christian heritage. I asked one day when his family became Christian. He turned and said, My people have been Christian since the time of Christ. Not many of us here today can say that. Yet he had a deep sympathy and understanding for other religions and other faiths than his own. As head of the Friends Mission School, (in Ramallah) he had the cooks observe all the religious feast or fast days of the children of other religious beliefs at the school.

My mother, Eva Marshall Totah, wrote a news item, Khalil Totah Memorial, for the Near East Yearly Meeting (of Friends), April 11, 1955:

Khalil Totah lived passionately, devotedly and completely for his convictions. That is why his words rang true and he was convincing to his students, to teachers, to friends and to the public. His advice to his students was, Choose your life work as you would choose your wife, because you love it, then give it everything you have. He lived that advice. The call of God, which came to him in his youth, to serve the people of his native land, was thus, not a chore, but a joy and his life’s consuming passion.

The eulogies gave me a big picture of my father and his life, seen through the eyes of people who knew him in different times, places, and relationships. These were windows into another father, the one the outside world knew. Later in life, I would learn more about this other father.

Throughout the ordeal of his death and its aftermath, none of us in the family cried, not even my mother. I had grown up knowing that my mother did not like displays of feelings, especially noisy ones. I shed a few tears, but held the rest back.

With my father gone, our family lost its head and the Palestinian people lost a leader.

Chapter 2

The Early Years

Education was the focus of my father’s life. From his earliest years in Ramallah to his death in Whittier, California, at age sixty-nine, learning and educating others were his focus. He was an educator: teacher, principal, political activist, and author. As a parent, he focused on his children’s education. As a brother, he helped two of his siblings attend college in the United States.

His father was dedicated to giving Khalil the education that both wanted for him. He attended several government and church schools before the Friends’ Boys’ School opened in Ramallah in 1901. He immediately enrolled at the new school. Father thrived under the guidance and mentorship of the American Quaker teachers and administrators. Two of his five older sisters, Hilaneh and Martha, attended the Friends Girls School, then called the Girls’ Training Home, and then taught there and in village schools. His two younger brothers, Selim and Ibrahim, attended the Friends’ Boys’ School, called the Boys’ Training Home at that time. Hilaneh and Martha contributed their salaries (or part of them) to Father’s education.

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c. Selim Totah, Khalil’s brother, Earlham College Yearbook, 1916.

A secondary theme in Father’s life after education was the continual scarcity of money and the injury to his pride of always having to get financial help to fund his education. Khalil’s father, Abdallah, was of modest means, a grain merchant and weaver of men’s robes (bisht, bushut. pl.). The family was large, and several children died. Eight lived to adulthood.

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Four male founders of the Ramallah Friends Meeting. Abdallah Totah, Khalil’s father, on right

While Father’s education was a major motivating factor in his life, his rootedness in his native land played an important role in the development of his character. He grew up in a small town, a tight-knit religious community. His home education was based on Bible stories. He knew the land of Palestine well and associated stories of the Bible with the places where these stories took place. Village life taught him how to negotiate social situations. He seemed comfortable and at home in any kind of gathering.

During his life, Father left Ramallah many times and always returned. His life was molded by the people, traditions, and connections that caused the town to thrive. Ramallah, its history, its character, and its place in Palestine, is tightly woven into Father’s life.

Ramallah

Ramallah is a hill town on the central spine of Palestine, ten miles north of Jerusalem. The mountains that it straddles are 35 miles east of the Mediterranean Sea. The Dead Sea is a steep 20-mile drop down the east side of the mountains. From up in the undulating hills, you can see west to the coastal plain and the lights of Tel Aviv and Haifa. To the south, Jerusalem glows in the distance, its ancient stone walls and towers still magical through the pain and strife of wars and bloodshed. Ramallah’s high elevation makes it a cool summer destination. In winter, it is cold and there is sometimes snow. In the spring and fall, the Sirocco—hot, dry, sand-bearing winds from the Sahara Desert—make life miserable.

The history of Ramallah from the mid-1500s until 1948 is the story of an extended family. The town was founded by a clan of five Christian brothers who fled from the Karak-Shoubek region in present-day Jordan after altercations with a Muslim sheikh who wanted one of the tribe’s sons to marry his daughter. Dramatic stories abound about these origins. The story of the departure from Jordan of five brothers has been gathered and documented by Ramallah historians Aziz Shaheen and Khalil Abu Raya.

The impact of the five brothers’ settling Ramallah is still felt there. For five centuries, the five brothers and their descendants intermarried and formed five clans, all recognized to this day. Because of intermarriage over several centuries, the genealogical line of Ramallah’s original families is pure. Marriage between cousins was customary and is still accepted.

Economic hardship in the region caused many men to emigrate to North and South America seeking work in the early 1900s. Until recently, men who had immigrated to the United States typically returned to Ramallah to find a bride and bring her back. Since the partition of Palestine in 1948 and the resulting wars, dispossession, and occupation, emigration has accelerated, particularly among Christians.

Throughout history, Ramallah and the other villages and towns surrounding Jerusalem depended on the big city for services and commodities: the best shopping, hospitals, government offices, and the centers of the major religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Foreign churches built schools there, and pilgrims came to honor the holy city, to preach and convert, and often, to stay. Trade was brisk between Jerusalem and Ramallah, though Ramallah was self-sufficient for the basic needs of life.

The Manara, which means beacon or light, is a monument that marks the center of town. It has changed over the years since being erected by the British in 1934 to house the electric utility. The changes reflect historical events and serve as a metaphor for changing political realities.

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The Manara, central Ramallah, April, 1998.

Father and his family lived in various parts of central Ramallah over the years. The Friends schools are located centrally, the boys school on the border of the adjacent town of El Bireh, a block from the Manara. The girls school is a mile away, in the old part of town called Tahta, or lower Ramallah. I used to walk from our home at the Friends’ Boys’ School (FBS), where Father was the principal, past the Manara, the shops, and the Friends Meeting House, down to the Friends’ Girls’ School (FGS).

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Ramallah Friends Meeting House, 1930’s.

The first Friends schools were located near the present FGS in Tahta. I have vivid memories of walking through Tahta on my way to school, of seeing, smelling, and eating delicious wreaths of warm, fragrant bread covered with sesame seeds, worn like bracelets on the arms of the boys selling them. They sang out, "ka’ik sukhun, ka’ik sukhun (hot bread, hot bread!)." On my way to school, I also passed the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches.

Religious groups in Ramallah played an integral role in the community, introducing people to education and officiating at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. The history of the town and its