RIP Leila Abu-Saba
Leila Abu-Saba was one of the first great American bloggers for Palestinian rights and Arab-Israeli peace. Since early 2004, she used her blog Dove's Eye View to explore many dimensions of her Lebanese-American heritage, her family life, Lebanese politics, peace issues, identity issues, and from time to time the cancer that started to develop within her shortly after she started blogging.
Recently, she hadn't been blogging so much. She wrote here, in July, that she'd decided to concentrate on her novel.
Yesterday, she died. You can find a nice, short appreciation of her life and work, here.
She was humane, she was funny, she was inquisitive, and wonderful.
Every so often on her blog, there would be references to her two sons, Jacob and Joseph, now roughly seven and nine years old. On July 23, she posted an adorable picture of the three of them together, here. You'd also sometimes see references to her husband, David, who is Jewish, and the discussions they had about the heritages shared by the family they created.
Oh, here's a picture of the four of them.
My thoughts are mainly with David, Jacob, and Joseph. (My mother also died when I was eight, after a long illness. It was hard for all of us, including my father.)
Salam, shalom, strength and comfort to the three of them. And thank you, thank you, Leila for all you did.
Wasn't aware of her before, and from her site I suspect that is my loss. Joining you in similar thoughts on her loss.
T.
Thanks, Helena, for drawing attention to stories like this one. It brings special significance for me. Y-w-h rest Leila's soul.
Oh my, like Misty Gerner, another fine independent voice, taken from us too early. Yet thanks for the reference to her web site. I hope her family can keep it up for us. I shall keep treating myself, and future students, to her good words -- and recipes:
"I knew that humans have big hearts everywhere, that even in the midst of war people pray and meditate, people do good works for each other, people reach out. People always take actions to construct positive good, no matter how bad the behavior of others around them. I wanted to blog visions of the world we want to have, not the problems that plague us....
Of course as soon as I began blogging, bad stuff started happening in the Middle East. Whenever it seemed too hypocritical to blog signs of hope (how can you chirp about flying kites when they're blowing up children in Gaza?) I would post recipes. "When there's no hope left, you can always make dinner,..."
Amen.... Make it so.