Shadid spares no details of the onerous restoration of his great-grandfather’s house. When that collapsed after the war, the Allied powers created countries in the region, including Lebanon, disturbing centuries of tribal divisions by devising false borders, making a nation out of religious factions that included Maronite Christians, Druze and Muslims and driving families away who had inhabited the region for centuries. Until that point, the region had existed as part of the Ottoman Empire. Samara, who died in 1928, remained behind in Marjayoun while his family slowly emigrated to Oklahoma and other points in the United States to escape the violence that came following World War I. The Marjayoun of the past, once a cultural hub in the region, is long gone, replaced by a ghost town that is constantly threatened by violence: since World War I, its population has dipped from nearly 4,000 residents to just 800.Ī key figure in the narrative is Isber Samara, Shadid’s maternal great-grandfather who originally built the house using the money he acquired from the Turks during the war. Instead, a shadow of sadness hangs over Shadid’s account, a wistful longing for a Middle East that no longer exists. Nor is it a moony piece of rediscovering one’s roots and the bonding brotherhood of a building project. However, this is not a one-dimensional account of construction and the self-satisfaction one achieves from such a task. Meanwhile, the seeds of another civil war are on the horizon as Shadid ties the narrative of restoring the house with his family’s history. Shadid eventually moved to Marjayoun following the demise of his first marriage and took on the task of rebuilding the house to its old glory. One former resident even turned the cistern into a cesspit.
Left in total disrepair and damaged in the Lebanese conflicts with Israel and during the country’s civil war, the structure sat derelict and forgotten.
While there, he discovered his grand-grandfather’s stone house.
He begins his memoir with a 2006 visit to Marjayoun, the Christian town in southeastern Lebanon near the border of Israel where his ancestors lived before departing for the promise of the United States. Shadid was one of the best writers covering the unfolding situation in the Middle East for publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the eerie nearness of Anthony Shadid’s death makes the dreams and aspirations of House of Stone almost unbearable, especially when one is armed with the knowledge of what is just around the corner for our narrator, who died at the age of 43 while on assignment in Syria in early 2012. Their voices filter up through the centuries, not enough to really quell the desire, but enough to relegate their owners to the dusty annals of history. The distance of death eases the longing and emotion when we read a memoir of someone long passed.
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