World comes together to rebuild a beloved Gazan bookstore

You may at one time or another find yourself agreeing, under duress, to live in a neighborhood without a bookstore, but in a town without one? No siree! Surely a town without a bookstore isn’t a town.

Last May, a bomb destroyed the Samir Mansour Bookstore, or Mansour’s, as it is known.

You say, so what! Well, you see, to Gazans Mansour’s was more than a mere brick-and-mortar bookstore you went to just to buy a book on your reading list.

Mansour’s had been, for the previous 22 years, an institution, a revered community hub where bibliophiles gravitated to browse through its 100,000 or so collection of titles, with each being a New World waiting to be discovered by a people unable to move beyond the confines of the densely population strip of land they were sardined into.

And Mansour’s had been the bookstore where virtually all the books in any Gazan’s home library had been purchased.

That day in May, when that beloved bookstore was hit by a missile that turned it into what everyone thought would be forgotten dust, the owner, Samir Mansour -- who at age 14 was apprenticed by his father as a book seller, book collector and book lover -- plaintively described how the disaster impacted him. “It was like my soul came out of me”, later adding, “We will rebuild it”

Mansour had no way of knowing that that the “we” would become people from virtually everywhere around the globe.

The obliteration of the building that housed Mansour’s, along with its extensive collection of books, prompted a world-wide campaign by rights activists based in England that generated $250,000 from 4,800 donors around the world. Close to 150,000 books were donated by people in the UK alone.

According to a news report in the Guardian last week, when the word went out that the storage of all those books had become a challenge to the activists, a cargo company, on its own, approached them, via social media and “volunteered to put the books on pallets and stack them with forklifts in a warehouse”. Then another company called Awesome Books volunteered trucks to pick up books from every storage facility they were kept around the country.

Harry Potter fans in Palestine

When it was revealed that Mansour had requested Harry Potter books because the these were popular with kids in Gaza, many donors went out and bought new Harry Potter box-sets to donate, with one volunteer, according to the Gurdian report, selling home-baked brownies and cupcakes for an entire month to raise money to buy more JK Rowling books.

One man from Santa Barbara, California, reportedly spent $300 shipping three boxes of books. More and yet more books were shipped from the UAE, Greece, France, Italy, Singapore and various US cities.

When the new bookstore reopens, in a new building in a new location close to the old site on February 12, its rebirth will not only be a testament to the empathy the world community has for Gazans but also to the sanctity that that community recognizes should be accorded books -- books as necessary oxygen for the life of the mind.

And Gazans do indeed need books around them to read much as they need oxygen to breathe. As Arabs, they are heirs to a cultural tradition penetrated from its historical origins by a sense of the value of the intellect in quotidian life. Let’s not forget that the first sentence in the Quran, the Holy Text of Muslims everywhere, begins with the imperative verb, “Read ... “

To be sure, the civilizational role that books play in our lives and the intellectual inquisitiveness they trigger in our minds, is universal to all cultures around the world.

Insecure societies fear them. Fascist societies burn them. And Communist societies feel destabilized by them, for consider how the publication of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, in 1957, and of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume The Gulag Archipologo between 1973 and 1978 shook Communist Russia to its core.

Intellectual effusions

Even liberal society, say, the United States, not known (God forbid!) to fear, burn or be shocked to its core by books, is not immune to the impact of books, particularly those authored by public intellectuals with wide readership and an adversarial voice.

Consider, as a case in point, how the transition from left to right, or if you wish, from radical to conservative, by John Dos Passos in the late 1930s and by Christopher Hitchens soon after -- well, virtually moments after -- the 9/11 attacks represented a major crisis in the life of that milieu of progressives we call the intelligentsia.

These little, miraculous thingmajigs we call books can do all that -- and then some. Thus deny a human community access to the intellectual effusions contained in them, I say, and you deny it its raison d’etre as a human community.

Since donors of books to Mansour’s were encouraged to write messages inside their donated books, including their e-mail addresses, with the expectation that the books’ new owners would contact them, I’m hoping that not too long after Mansour’s had reponed on Saturday, February 12, I will hear from a fellow bibliophile who had picked up and read through the one precious copy of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye -- on my shelf since 1973 -- I had donated.

As for the message I scribbled on the inside cover page, well, I’m not saying. That’s between one fan of Holden Caulfield and another.

— Fawaz Turki is a journalist, academic and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile