Immigrant Tales Haunted by Tradition

If earlier generations of immigrants tended to make their homes near ports of entry--Ellis Island, Alcatraz--many of today’s new Americans settle in Los Angeles, sometimes dubbed “The New Ellis Island.” Gradually their tales of arrival and adjustment surface, gracing us with a polyphonous new literature: writing’s equivalent of music’s world beat.

Frances Khirallah Noble’s slim volume of short stories, her first, sews another square into this emergent multicultural literary quilt. Her characters, Christian Arabs from Syria and Lebanon, comprise an extended family fanning out across Southern California, descendants of a primary figure: the situe.

Situe is the Arabic word for grandmother, a figure whose presence permeates these tales and the lives they describe. The opening title story, in which we meet one such situe, Hasna Elias, in her native Syrian village, is full of dreams and spells. From there the stories take on more realist modalities as the family goes forth and multiplies--in Southern California’s duplexes and small homes, grocery stores and shoe factories and dry-goods emporiums, struggling to gain a foothold in the New World. Adult school, getting a library card, learning English, marrying outsiders: Each rite of passage is freighted with fear and empowerment. To these emigres, Los Angeles appears “warm, uncluttered, like the old country, healing to the joints and lungs, where the familiarity of oranges, grapes and dates grew along the streets and in the vast spaces between buildings.”

Woven through these tales of struggle and assimilation is the situe, still sucking on the white china pipe she brought from her village, reading fortunes in coffee grounds or boxes of sand, taping a baby’s navel so it won’t stick out when the child grows up, preparing sustaining meals of kibbe (raw lamb paste), yogurt, olive, eggplant, tabbouleh. Fierce, fretful, indomitable, the situe chaperones the family dance of life even as her children and grandchildren vacation at Crestline, visit relatives in Mexicali, sell silk in Palm Springs, become ever more American, unreadable to her.

At their best, the stories in this modest, admirable book offer sharp, illuminating glimpses into the lives of this Arab American clan. Khirallah Noble’s elliptical, close-up prose cuts to the marrow of experience, often presented in fragments from which we glean the whole. Yet this stripped style has its disadvantages, claustrophobic at times, too spare to draw us in, occluding psychological insight. Sentences feel compiled, not sung or spun; we miss a shaping context, a wider lens. Yet across the course of the book these vivid flashes accumulate, leaving the reader finally with an achieved vision of families in ferment and flux, making their way in the new land.

In the last story, “The Honor of Her Presence,” the author reprises the situe Hasna Elias, old and drinking a little too much wine, having made the journey from “an undulating village life, where a wild girl rode stallions to the sea, to a small white frame duplex in Alhambra, California.” In a rest home at the end, Hasna Elias dreams a memory of traveling west on a rushing train, “disembarking . . . into a vast and unknowable place,” her voyage complete.

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Tony Cohan is the author, most recently, of the memoir “On Mexican Time.”