The Roanoke Times: Grapevines

Richard Alouf (far left), Matt Chittum's grandfather Joe Alouf (second from left), Edna Copty's grandfather Abdallah Alouf (center), Fred Alouf (boy, center), Victoria Alouf, and Frank Alouf

Day 1 — From the Bekaa Valley to the Blue Ridge

Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4

Matt Chittum / The Roanoke Times

A journey of discovery

“Lebanon always surrendered her men to the stories of wealth abroad. Like their ancients, the Phoenecians, they took to the sea.”

— Elmaz Abinader “Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon”

Grapevines

Staff writer Matt Chittum is half Lebanese. He grew up eating Lebanese food, but doesn't speak Arabic.

With the death of his mother in 1997, he lost his main connection to his cultural heritage, so he set out to rediscover that culture on his own.

Along the way, he heard stories of shrewd adaptation, cultural pride and anger — now fading — over the discrimination suffered by the Lebanese in Roanoke. He recaptured his mother in deeper dimensions than he'd known when she was alive. He learned his place in her culture and his responsibility for helping to preserve that culture.

Multimedia:
Watch video and hear interviews as local residents talk about their Lebanese heritage.

Web sites:
American Family Immigration History Center
Users can search passenger lists for their ancestors, learn when they arrived at Ellis Island and on what ship, and view images of ships and ships' manifests.

St. Elias Maronite Catholic Church
This site provides a history of Roanoke's only Maronite church and the Lebanese immigrants who founded it, along with explanations of key Maronite historical figures and beliefs.

Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese American Clubs
The federation was founded by immigrants in 1931 to promote "Americanism" and the preservation of Syrian and Lebanese culture.

National Alliance of Lebanese Americans
NALA is a nonpartisan group devoted to humanitarian efforts and education via commentaries on Lebanon.

Arab American Institute
AAI is a nonprofit organization committed to the civic and political empowerment of Americans of Arab descent.

I cussed in Arabic when I was a kid. I ate foods none of my friends ate, like lentils and "kibbee" — raw lamb meat ground with bulgur wheat.

I remember my grandmother's greasy fingers carefully filling grape leaves with lamb and rice to make "warak inib mihshee," rolling them like short green cigars. She harvested the leaves from a grapevine in her back yard that had been in the family for decades. When she died, it was transplanted to my parents' yard.

My grandmother's name was Adele Alouf. I called her "Sitty," the Arabic word for grandmother. But no one in my generation understood them when she and her sister, Victoria, sat around at family gatherings speaking Arabic in front of the others.

Being half-Lebanese was a mere novelty to me. I didn't recognize that I was part of a great cultural tradition.

That didn't begin to dawn on me until six years ago, when my great aunt Victoria died. We buried her in St. Andrews Catholic Cemetery on Salem Turnpike.

After the funeral, my mother, Jeanette Alouf Chittum, pointed out all the weathered headstones of Roanoke's Lebanese families. There were the Milans, who owned the tobacco shop downtown. And the Aesys, who own the luncheonette on Campbell Avenue. And the Ferrises, the family of a lawyer I knew. And the Thomases, the kin of Vic Thomas, the politician and merchant.

I never knew there were so many of us.

Mom died less than a year later. I let her slip away without honoring her by asking about her past. I don't get much Lebanese food anymore. No one speaks Arabic at family dinners. Our grapevine died a long time ago.

So I set out to discover my mother's past for myself; to find out what it really means to be Lebanese, and what of that survives in me and my four older siblings.

I went back to the cemetery. I scribbled down the names from the headstones: Abdella, Onn, Attalla, Malouf, Jabbour, Farida, Wiggins, Assaid, Najjum, Saleeba, Monsour, Ellis, Moses, Murray, Souma, Saker, Abdelnour, Wheby, Goria.

I would learn that the names belonged to Lebanese immigrants who came here determined to succeed on American terms. They were told where they could and could not live. Their children were told where they could play and where they weren't wanted.

The Lebanese were even told where they could be buried. They are gathered in one part of the cemetery — the back — segregated by the Catholic Church.

Pressing to fit in, many Lebanese confined their heritage to their homes.

They achieved wealth, status and power, and after a time could go and do as they pleased. But in the process, many lost their Lebanese selves.

Today, Roanoke's Lebanese are almost unidentifiable except at festivals, or in their own homes, or to those familiar with the names and other signs — such as the grapevine in the back yard.

At the cemetery, the first name I wrote down was carved into a humble white stone: Abdalah Alouf.

Springing from that name I found the story of an immigrant family that achieved wealth and success, only to be cleaved into pieces by that wealth within a single generation.

My look into the past seemed at first to be a tale of terrible loss — of love, of family and heritage. But as I pursued the story it became an act of retrieval and undeniable gain.

It was an act of mourning for my mother, and the only means I could find to return to her embrace.

‘Protracted sojourn’
Abdalah Kahlil Alouf, my great-grandfather, showed up on the doorstep of America in 1896 with one bag in his hand.

He came to make his fortune.

He came to Roanoke from Zahle, a mountain city in the cedar-dotted Bekaa Valley of what was then Syria.

When he was 48, he boarded a ship in Beirut with his oldest son, Rachid, who was 11. Rachid had one bag, too. Neither spoke English. They left behind my great-grandmother, Najeba, and Rachid's little brother and sister, Kahlil and Victoria.

They and hundreds of other Syrians steamed the length of the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic on a ship called the Taormina, traveling in the catacomb-like conditions of steerage. Abdalah was listed on the ship's manifest as a shoemaker.

In a column denoting the reason for Abdalah and Rachid's passage, a clerk wrote "P.S." — shorthand for a quaint phrase that belied the duration of their stay and the hard life ahead of them.

It stood for "protracted sojourn.”

The Taormina arrived at Ellis Island on May 16.

Exodus
Despite what it said on the ship's manifest, my great-grandfather was not a shoemaker, as far as I can tell. That was likely a story he made up to convince immigration officials that he had a useful skill so he wouldn't be deported as soon as he arrived in America.

Abdalah Alouf owned a small grape farm in Zahle, a market center in the stretch of mountains that runs like a spine down the length of what is now Lebanon. By December of 1896, seven months after arriving in Roanoke, he owned a piece of land in America.

With the help of another Syrian man, Abram Corhan, he paid $450 for a storefront building with an apartment above it at Fifth Street and Moorman Avenue Northwest. He signed the deed with an "X." The two opened a small grocery there.

Syrians poured out of their country in the late 19th century, particularly Christians such as the Maronite and Melkite Catholics who came to Roanoke. About 150,000 Syrians left their country between 1880 and 1920.

Though Syria was under the control of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and the Turks could be oppressive tyrants, the Syrians who left the country weren't seeking religious liberty, scholars say.

They were after money.

Syrian immigrants to America were barely a blip on the scale of immigration at the time, compared to the millions of Irish, Italians and other Europeans. But in Syria, where most settlements were villages of a few thousand, the departing numbers amounted to an exodus.

Those who came to “Amrika,” like Abdalah and his boy, fanned out across the continent.

It could be that the first Syrians in Roanoke — they didn't call themselves Lebanese for a few decades — got off the train here because they were told to by an immigration official. Or maybe this is as far as their money would carry them.

The romantic version of the story says the mountains drew them. Their sons and daughters say this little bud of a city in the Blue Ridge, 6,000 miles and a whole ocean from Syria, bore a comforting resemblance to the Bekaa Valley back home.

Whatever the reason, once the first Syrians settled here, a chain of migration began. Villages such as Zahle, Antoura and Kfarayeb were transplanted to Roanoke a family or two at a time.

Abdalah came to Roanoke because his wife's family, the Jabbours, also of Zahle, were already established here. Old Roanoke city directories show the Jabbours operated a dry goods store on Gregory Avenue Northeast with the Onn family in 1892. Joseph Wheeby, another Syrian, had a grocery on North Jefferson Street that same year. By 1895, the Couris and the Sakers were here, followed by the Gorias and the Moseses.

Syrian immigrants typically worked as pack peddlers until they earned enough money to rent a storefront, according to Alixa Naff, archivist of the Naff Arab American Collection at the Smithsonian Institution and the pre-eminent scholar on the Syrian-American experience.

They sold goods from a notions case called a "kashi.”

"They carried it on their backs," said Joe Milan Jr., whose family founded and owned Milan Brothers Tobacco until a few years ago. "They sold rugs, they sold jewelry, they sold tapestries, they'd walk out into the country . . . They had no cars, didn't ride horses. They walked.”

The men would scrape and save and when they had enough money, they would send for the rest of the family.

At Abdalah's store, the money came slowly. He spoke no English and apparently never learned much. Rachid went to school for just three years in Syria. He never attended school in America. But he began to learn English while working in the store.

"I can remember times he would sell $3 or $4 worth, he thought he had a good business," Rachid recalled 45 years later.

It was three years before they earned enough money to send for Rachid's mother and siblings.

For some, the separation lasted much longer. It took Joe Milan Sr. 11 years to bring his wife and daughter to America.

The Pickle Riot
An American woman came into the Aloufs' store one day looking for potatoes. Rachid's father called from the back of the store to see what the woman wanted.

Rachid, who would later take the American name Richard, answered in Arabic: “il ess.”

The woman, believing she had been insulted, stormed out.

Ray Alouf, my cousin and Richard Alouf's youngest child, told me that story. We drank coffee and ate "betlawa," similar to Greek baklava, one afternoon at his house at Smith Mountain Lake as we shared a laugh over this story his dad had told him.

But it makes a serious point: The culture clash must have been constant in those days.

Rachid responded with a determined effort to learn English and suppress his accent, Ray told me. Looking back, it seems the slow and steady sacrifice of his cultural heritage started right there.

But, I can't judge Rachid. His world was something I can't fathom.

Roanoke was a booming railroad town, complete with dirt roads and the standard white majority. The swarthy-looking Syrians didn't inspire patience in the natives.

They colonized in the poorer parts of town, clustering in Gainsboro and old Northeast Roanoke. They lived in the shadow of the only Catholic church in town, St. Andrews, just as they had in their villages back home. If their neighbors in Roanoke weren't Syrian, they were probably black and just as poor.

Newspapers from that period mention the Syrians only in the police briefs, and rarely by name. "A Syrian was fined $6 for violating the sanitary ordinance," one 1896 item says.

No business in town would hire them. But the Syrians were independent by nature and probably wouldn't have worked for anyone else anyway.

In 1902, Roanoke's Clerks Union pressed to have all stores close at 7 p.m. "Fifty-three Syrian stores refused to join the movement," Raymond Barnes wrote in "History of the City of Roanoke.”

Syrians and other immigrants were becoming an economic force, due in part to their willingness to adapt.

Sam Ferris Saleeba was embarrassed that he couldn't read, write or spell his own last name in English for salesmen who called on him in his stores, so he made his middle name his surname. When he died in 1959, the stone placed on his grave identified him as "Sam Ferris (Saleeba).”

The immigrants weren't always treated warmly. One July evening in 1907, a young American ordered a sandwich in a Greek-owned restaurant on Salem Avenue called The Belmont. He asked for extra pickles and onions, was charged a nickel for them, and promptly threw a fit.

Barnes presents the ensuing events downtown as almost comical. To Greek and Syrian immigrants, it must have been terrifying.

The angry customer, whom Barnes refers to as a "hoodlum,” threw a rock through the restaurant's window. The Greek owner fired a pistol in fear.

The customer stirred up a crowd outside nearby saloons, which ransacked The Belmont. The mayor and a judge arrived and called in the fire department to wet down the crowd. The mob commandeered the firehose and turned it on the mayor.

"Then down Salem Ave. went the crowd,” Barnes wrote, "smashing all windows of Greek and Syrian places of business.”

At the mayor's urging, the city later paid nearly $1,000 to compensate the immigrant business owners.

On their own
The Aloufs were prospering in their new country.

In 1902, Abdalah paid off the $450 loan for the store building and bought Abram Corhan's half of the grocery business.

Not long after that, he started buying land around the store at the intersection of Fifth and Moorman. He would send Richard, who had learned English, to make the deals and sometimes he would put the land in Richard's name.

Land ownership was status in the old country, and the Aloufs soon owned most of a city block.

The second son, Kahlil, who became Frank, went to school for a few years but disliked it. He quit to work around the store with his father and brother. My grandfather, Joseph Albert Alouf, was born in 1898. His little brother Fred came along three years later.

Their mother, Najeba, who quickly came to be called Nannie in her new country, got pregnant again in 1904. Neither the baby nor Nannie survived the birth. Nannie was 39 years old.

A 1906 family photograph shows my great-grandfather, stone-faced, with his five children gathered around him. Abdalah seems to look past the camera, his blank expression partly hidden by his curling mustache.

The oldest boys are seated on either side in vested suits, high collars and narrow ties. Their sister, Victoria, is pretty despite her somber expression. Her dark hair is pulled back in a braid. Fred is a chubby 3-year-old in knickers. My grandfather, Joseph, seems tired and forlorn in his little double-breasted wool coat and pants. It strikes me that almost nothing in the picture distinguishes them as the immigrants they were.

Two years after that portrait was taken, Abdalah fell ill. He was taken to the old Roanoke Memorial Hospital and placed in a room on the seventh floor, where in a fit of dementia one March morning, he wandered over the edge of the balcony.

"I went up to see him that morning early, and I thought he was getting along better, and when I got back, I found him dying," Richard would later recall. Abdalah didn't make it through the day.

The five Alouf children, ages 23, 20, 14, 10 and 7, were orphaned and on their own in America.