Her village, Nawara, is known for lovely, cleverly embroidered dresses (rozas) in an area of villages where almost no one embroiders, for lack of time and money. My mother was competent in embroidery, but she was not typical—even in her already nontypical village—and her interests lay elsewhere. Her father had a great deal of land in Ramallah, a city filled with ideas and energy. He knew about the world and he believed in education, which was why he let my mother go to America for college. Unfortunately, he also had a very traditional side to his thinking, which is how it came to be that my mother ended up marrying my father, an old foreigner, and why all three of her sisters married immediately after their graduation from high school.

The story goes that my father, a Jordanian landowner in his late thirties, saw my mother once when she was still in high school—he had been doing business with my grandfather for years and for the first time went home with him for a visit. He fell so in love with my mother that he offered my grandfather a large portion of his own land in Ramallah as dowry if she would marry him. At the time my grandfather refused, saying that she still needed to finish high school and was planning to go on to university, maybe abroad. After that, she alone would be free to accept or refuse the offer. My father announced that in spite of his age (more than twenty years her senior), he would wait until my mother gave him her answer. It turned out he had to wait less than a year, when my mother returned from the States in disgrace—thanks to the lies of her brother’s friend. My father told my grandfather that regardless of the reason for my mother’s return, his offer still held. My grandfather, sure that this was his last chance to find an acceptable match for his daughter, accepted the offer.