Meet Count Talamas

Jaffa, from Nathalie Handal’s My East in Venice

“The previous year, I was having coffee with an Arab-Argentinian photographer at the Yafa Bookshop and Café. A man nearby apologized for intruding into our conversation and said, There is a house that the Talamas family owned in Old Jaffa port, close to The Old Man and the Sea restaurant, and it has a dream view. I asked him to explain which house he was speaking about. I was aware of the land my family once owned, but the photos I have are of houses on hills and orange groves. Today the city is completely urbanized. It takes effort to visualize where these old homes once stood.

My friend and I followed the man’s instructions. When we arrived at the location, we asked a Palestinian woman for help. She pointed to the remains of an old stone house on a plot of land not yet developed by the Israelis. The view of the sea filled my body quietly.

The Palestinian woman said, Now he lives in Ajami, a formerly affluent neighborhood turned Arab ghetto. Who, I asked? The man who owned this house, she replied. I grew hopeful.

I immediately called a local friend to help me find out more. The next day, we went to see a blind man said to know by heart one thousand telephone numbers. When we arrived at his office, he was behind his desk on the telephone asking for information about my uncle. My friend had briefed him about me. He put down the phone and told me, We had a person from the Handal family here. His wife was called Aziza. She was from Birzeit. They both died in Jaffa thirty years ago or so. Then he added, As for the Talamas… There was Badiyah Talamas who died in the 1970s, and Emily Talamas who married Benoit Alonzo, their children are in Italy…Milano…three sons and one daughter. He named two, Amadeo and Romano. I asked, Who is Emily? He told me she was the daughter of Count Talamas, a relative who apparently had been given that title by the Pope as he was a generous supporter of the church and the Vatican.

He proceeded to tell me that the uncle I was looking for was a bit sick and that he had three sisters, one in Amman who he thinks married someone from the Haifawi family. You know, he added, when families moved from one city to the city, their surname changed to the city they came from, Haifawi from Haifa, Nabulsi from Nablus. One rarely knew what the surname was before that.

That’s how information has been delivered to me throughout my life: pieces that need to be reassembled. My search has been among people afraid to speak for they’ve been tortured, or unable to speak for their wounds are too wrenched. And I’ve had to consider the cracks of memory, its blunders, the way information is transmitted from one person to the next, what was lost and forgotten, what was added.

The telephone rang. Someone had found my uncle’s number. As I listened to the blind man repeat it, the last three numbers, sitta, sab’a, thaalatha, echoed inside of me as if this were my last chance to meet a member of that generation. The call ended with the usual long Middle Eastern gratitudes: Shukran kteer kteer illak, shukran, bye bye, wala’himak, ahla. And with the final mumtaz, a common expression meaning “excellent,” we headed to my uncle’s house.

As we walked through Ajami, I tried to imagine the once-majestic multicultural Palestinian city of Jaffa. Taking a stroll down the grand boulevard to the lavish Alhambra Cinema, or along the port, through the winding alleyways of the Old City where some homes had striking views of the sea, sitting on the grand balconies of Mediterranean villas with lush gardens or in music halls and cafes. My thoughts strayed to the early 1950s, when Jaffa, once Palestine’s largest city, became known as the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality, and Palestinians became a minority, forced to live in neglected neighborhoods, patrolled and closed off with barbed wire.

We stopped at an iconic green pharmacy where the owner knew the stories of all the families from Jaffa. And a little further down, to the right, was Dar Talamas Street, known today as Sha’arey Nikanor Street. I paused at number 9, Count Talamas’s house, which had been converted into eight Israeli apartments. I looked at every new name beside the buzzers and wondered what these inhabitants, or those before them, did with all of my family’s possessions: the furniture, paintings, albums, letters. How did they reconcile the fact that they slept in the houses of those forced into exile in Alexandria, Beirut, Trieste, Venice, Marseille, London, Paris, and Santiago?

As I walked away, the sun resting on my back, I felt the trauma of my relatives sinking inside of me. Those who fled and have to live with a void, those who stayed and are second-class citizens in Israel or imprisoned behind the wall in the West Bank, their lives twisted with frustration, grief, and adversity.

When I reached my uncle’s house, I paused. He had come outside to greet me. I was struck by the common family traits: the rectangular face, the blue eyes, the tall and long physique. We embraced as if we had known each other all of our lives. Two more family members came out to meet me, and they too had piercing eyes. They immediately served me drinks and sweets. I admired the patterned fern green, white, earth-toned, and purple-red Palestinian tiles. I was struck by how familiar the house was to that of my grandparents—the wooden furniture, the embroidered tablecloth, the ornaments—and also how it contained the same energy, one that is deeply alive despite all the loss, one that is cultured and proud. That vigor decorated the house.

My uncle explained that he came from the branch that didn’t have the money to flee by boat in 1948. He showed me photos. I was surprised by how many women were nuns. He mentioned that there was still one in Jerusalem, but then added that he thought she passed away. I knew too well that even when the miles between us weren’t much, the reality that separated us was interminable. Before I left, he gave me an envelope of photos and told me to visit my relatives in Venice who had a restaurant. When I asked for more information, he said, When you get to the train station, turn left and you’ll find it.”