“But don’t get me wrong, I’m not Middle Eastern,” Uncle interrupts. “I’m from the Levant! A proud descendant of Hellenistic culture. The Mediterranean and the Near East were one. No one talks about this anymore, but it’s a fact. Smyrna, Alexandria, Beirut—they were profoundly cosmopolitan. We weren’t in separate boxes, the Greeks here, the Syrians over there. We constantly mingled. How would the Western classics have survived if they had not been translated into Arabic?”
