Cry In a Long Night

by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, William Tamplin (Translator)

Cry in a Long Night opens with Amin Samaa, a young man, walking the length of his native city on a stormy night. He is on his way to the palace of his employer, the aristocratic heiress Inayat Yasser, who has employed him as a writer to work on a grand history of her Ottoman family. On his night journey across the city, Amin recalls his idyllic childhood in a nearby village, his father’s death when he was just ten years old, and his family’s move to the city’s poorest quarters. Thoughts of his estranged wife, Sumaya Shanoub, haunt him continually and her sudden reappearance forces him to make a decision that will change his life drastically.

240 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2022

About the author

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Arabic: جبرا إبراهيم جبرا) was an Iraqi-Palestinian author, artist and intellectual born in Adana in French-occupied Cilicia to a Syriac Orthodox Christian family. His family survived the Seyfo Genocide and fled to the British Mandate of Palestine in the early 1920s. Jabra was educated at government schools under the British-mandatory educational system in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, such as the Government Arab College, and won a scholarship from the British Council to study at the University of Cambridge. Following the events of 1948, Jabra fled Jerusalem and settled in Baghdad, where he found work teaching at the University of Baghdad. In 1952 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities fellowship to study English literature at Harvard University. Over the course of his literary career, Jabra wrote novels, short stories, poetry, criticism, and a screenplay. He was a prolific translator of modern English and French literature into Arabic. Jabra was also an enthusiastic painter, and he pioneered the Hurufiyya movement, which sought to integrate traditional Islamic art within contemporary art through the decorative use of Arabic script.

Reviews

[mymona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeously written stories!

I truly felt I was walking pre-Nakba Jerusalem streets, tasting the air and the emotions of that time and that space.

I could feel this eery discomfort and at times disgust towards life and the city or what the city was becoming to the characters. Although at times difficult to read, it was so powerful and something that requires time and effort to soak in.

I will be picking it up again in the future.

[BaSila Husnain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edward said, said it first! Awesome in short