Through and Through: Toledo Stories, Second Edition

Arab American Writing

by Joseph Geha

Treasured in the Arab-American literary community, "Through and Through" is a collection of broadly interrelated stories, eight originally published in 1990 with three new stories added in the second edition. One of the first books of modern Arab-American fiction, Joseph Geha's stories offer a warm, inspired portrait of an extended Arab family in a Lebanese and Syrian community in Toledo, Ohio, spanning the decades between the 1930s and the present. In a series of vignettes, Geha follows three generations of an Arab-American family as they create a new community and way of life, struggling to keep their Arab roots vital while adapting their culture to new conditions. In "Holy Toledo," Nadia, 'a tomboy in her dungarees', watches American women come into her town to shop. Although she calls them silly, she 'wished that she were one of them, returning with them into that huge strangeness, America, luring her despite the threat it seemed to hold of loss and vicious homesickness.' Portraying both the anguish and the humor of negotiating between the old world and the new, these stories offer a passionate, unvarnished glimpse into the lives of an immigrant community.

Genres: Contemporary

176 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1990

About the author

Born in Lebanon and raised in the USA, Joseph Geha is the author of Through and Through: Toledo Stories (Graywolf: St. Paul, 1990), a collection of short stories inspired by his experiences growing up in an émigré Arab American community. In 2009, Syracuse University Press published a second (expanded) edition.

Joe's novel, Lebanese Blonde (University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 2012), is the winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award.

He has also been granted the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his fiction has been chosen for inclusion in the Permanent Collection, Arab American Archive, of the Smithsonian Institution.

Over the years Joe's fiction -- along with his poetry, essays and plays -- has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Epoch, Esquire, The New York Times, The Northwest Review, Homeground, The Iowa Review, New York Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, The Amherst Review, Kaleidoscope, A Nation's Voice, Crazyquilt, The New Virginia Review, Growing up Ethnic in America, Big City Cool, Homeground, and The Quarterly.

Married to novelist Fern Kupfer, he lives in Ames, Iowa, where he is a professor emeritus of the Creative Writing Program at Iowa State University.

Reviews

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 3 out of 5]

** 3.5 stars **

As with most short story collections, I enjoyed some of the stories here more than others. Geha's stories are very loosely interconnected, all focusing on an Arab community in Toldeo, OH from the 1930s through the 1970s. Occasionally you will see a name from a previous story pop up in another, but all of the stories can be read as standalones.

For some reason, I felt that the stories in the latter half of the volume were stronger than the first half. The stories I particularly liked were those that focused on a single individual's thoughts and feelings - whether that was about assimilation, dating after a divorce, the death of a relative, or nostalgia for the past. Those stories, for me, held the most interesting insights into the human condition.

I would recommend this collection if you like short stories, particularly ones that center on the experience of immigrants to the US around the mid-20th century.

[Debra B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting characters. Well-written.

[Rashmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A melancholy and interesting set of Lebanese-American stories. As a first generation American myself, I find it fascinating to read collections like these - stories of immigrants have so many things in common and yet also are so different.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, and thank God, because it is the first time I have ever really recognized my own immigrant background in a literary work. It would have been such a disappointment if it did not also rate as excellent fiction. It does!

Like the author, I grew up in a city on the Great Lakes with a large Lebanese-American community. The code-switching, the shifting of traditions and culture. The children who study their parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents as closely as the “Amerkani.”