Leila Farsakh Transcript
Video interview in Boston, Massachusetts By Alice Rothchild Leila Farsakh transcript AR: So can you tell me your name, date of birth, and where you were born? LF: My name is Leila Farsakh, and I was born in Irbid. And I was born in 1967, just two months after the war. This is why I was born in Jordan, instead of being born in Birzeit where my family comes from. AR: And can you tell me something about your family before ’48, where people were living? LF: Well my family, my father’s side, they came from Ramallah, from the Birzeit region, they were born in Birzeit. But his mother was born in a town beside Nazareth which was wiped out by the Israelis in 1948. She came from Saffuriyya. So my grandmother, who I knew, that I grew up with, came from that town which in 1945 was actually as big as Nazareth, and had a big Palestinian community. My grandmother was born there. She actually went to school in Saffuriyya, in the school run by nuns. So for her generation she was quite early, she could read and write. She could read quite well the Quran because she was very pious. She could write her name. She got married when she was young, married when she was thirteen years old. I think she got married, ‘25, 1926, that’s my suspicion, yeah, I think. And she came down from Nazareth, from Saffuriyya, which was a big town, to Birzeit, which at the time was a little village. And what I know of ’48… So my father tells me that they went once or twice to Saffuriyya to see his uncles.
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