Author Gregory Orfalea Discusses His New Book: Angeleno Days - An Arab American Writer on Family, Place & Politics

Fri, 04/07/2006 - 1:19pm

When: January 21, 2010 at the Traverwood Branch

There are more than 400,000 Arab Americans in Los Angeles--the largest contingent in America outside of Detroit. In his new book, 'Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer On Family, Place And Politics,' Gregory Orfalea explores his own community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq. Books will be on sale at the event, which will also include a booksigning.Gregory Orfalea directed the Writing Program at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, and currently teaches Arab American Literature at Georgetown University.

Transcript

• [00:00:25.84] Welcome folks. I'm glad to have you here. My name is Beth Manuel. I work for the Ann Arbor District Library in the Outreach and Neighborhood Services Department. And the reason we're using a microphone in a small room is because we're going to film this event, and if your friends aren't here they can catch it on our website in a month or two. Is it aadl.tv. You can see other programs there as well. I want to ask you to take time at the end of the talk to fill out our evaluation, and they're over on that table right now. I do want to welcome Greg Orfalea, and it looks like it's old home week for him. He's got some friends here and I'm glad to have him. I look forward to hearing about our book, and we also have it in our collection. So you'll be able to borrow it. And they're for sale, also, outside. Thank you.
• [00:01:23.74] GREG ORFALEA: Nice to be here with particularly good friends. Truly good friends and new faces as well. Thanks for braving a cold night. I hope this keeps some of the cold away.
• [00:01:42.77] Kingdom of Rags. Speak to me Santee and Los Angeles streets, of a world of color flying by on a metal rack, skeletons of dress patterns shivering on a shoulder. I am listening for the sound of buttons jumping in a box, men groaning under bolts of cloth. I was the man or a boy flying by with color, shaking the buttons like the dice of my future, groaning with the men under [? worsted. ?] And now, half my life is gone and Santee Street is silent. I put my ear to the wind. The wind wing of his pale blue t-bird. In my young summers and on weekends I was drafted to ride with my father to the factory downtown. I don't think it was an order. We were a schmatta family, a brood familiar with rags. A century ago my father's Syrian father was the original linen merchant in Cleveland, Ohio. My eye for beauty both natural and false must owe something to the display window on Colorado Boulevard of [? A-Watt ?] of Pasadena.
• [00:03:12.31] My maternal grandfather's Corde handbag place. It was as automatic for us children to work in a garment factory as it is today for kids to jigger the joystick of a computer game. In 1955 my father, with outside man, Earl [? Risene ?] began his first dress firm, LeGreg of California, a stylish conjoining of the names of his two children, Leslie and Gregg. Dad's first make was an orange sleaveless dickey, right here, and we weren't alone. There were dozens of women's garment factories in the lofts and warehouses fanning out from the epicenter of the Cooper Building at night in Los Angeles streets. They were named as we were named, for wives and children, Jan Sue, Nancy Bea, Patty Woodard, Young Edwardian, Edith Flagg, Jodie Tuteek, and they were all selling the sun in a garment -- forget vacation, slip this on. Did I say this was Los Angeles? This is Los Angeles.
• [00:04:25.88] LeGreg had some real hits -- a striped tent dress that coyley hid baby-making of the '50s, sleaveless blouses and full buffante skirts -- $6.00 retail for a set. $6.00. Something a Texas chain called Margo's name and adds a pleat treat. A main boutique enlisted Women's Wear Daily as an agent asking the publisher to call LeGreg's to order the hot item, a sailor-collared chemise. But the rag trade was always precarious, and by 1963 the business had capsized. As my father once said, I'm not in one business, I'm in five, meaning for each of the four seasons plus holiday a manufacturer had to restyle his dressline. In this garment pentathalon, if you slipped during one season, if, for example, one hot style was made poorly by the contractor, had a bad fit or was undersold, the garments all flooded back and your kingdom was in a heap, you and yours were unstitched.
• [00:05:47.52] But rag people came back. That was the meaning of rags -- you were used to reuse. Dad named his new company Mr. [? Aref, ?] as if afraid to entrust his luck to anyone but himself. He took no partners, it worked. The company was the first to style and make the Granny, soon de rigeur for every protesting co-ed. It landed in the Time magazine. His designer, George Wilner revealed the genesis of that number -- and I'm quoting George now. A small retailer from Glendale brought me something in calico he said his daughter's friends had made and that the kids liked it. We found some leftover calico print fabric, some ruffle, and in two hours I had it styled en pier with cuffs like Empress Josephine, cut and stitched. Mary Bogasher, had of sales, took it onto the Broadway to Walt Dixon, the buyer, and we sold $10,000 of the Granny in one day. It took off like a rocket.
• [00:06:58.12] By the end of the '60s Mr. Aref was a million dollar operation with 70 employees. The company bought out another venerable firm, [? Ronelle, ?] and started two other labels, By George and Madison Seven. I think that was the phone number, Madison 77405. Amazing what you remember. Amazing what you forget, too.
• [00:07:24.68] The first sacrament of the day, Howard's Coffee Stand, a little nook at the entrance to the Cooper Building. Cream and sugar, Aref? Yes, Howard, as always. As always. Donut? Donut, as always. As always, donut. I like the way Howard's baritone pronounced sugar, as if he were giving the manufacturer his last sweetness of the day.
• [00:07:53.28] Then dad and I strode down the gauntlet of showcases that lined the hallway entry to the Cooper Building. Dad would whistle at his own showcase and call the manakin doll. And I would thrill at how prominent was our tent dress temptrest. Once the goods -- anything made was good -- were clipped of threads, I took them to shipping. I tried to first fill the orders of my aunt Vinny, Circle Fashions on Pico Boulevard. And aunt Janet, Jeanne's Casual on Reseda Boulevard. The family was in rags from start to finish -- father creating the styles, grandfather stitching the cloth, and my aunt's vending it. Bobby the black shipper gave me a pile of clipboards. Soon he and I were picking, swiftly unhooking dresses by size and color for each of the stores' orders. Fred, the Chinese American head of shipping riffled through the dresses on the silver rack one last time looking for my error, any error -- a collar misironed, a missing button, double-checking our work. Then Bobby and I set to it boxing and bagging. Soon the smell of the gummed wet brushes of the old tape machine filled the air, and the sound of tissue and the boxes stacking.
• [00:09:16.36] Before noon when I went out on the street, I took my orders from several workers. Jesse and Jose, the cutters, wanted their patterns. Our French designer, Maria, who had a hunch back, asked for buttons and silk thread. Eddie Gold, our old bookkeeper reminded me, paper spoons, paper spoons, dear boy.
• [00:09:41.71] Time for lunch. Speak to me, sands of Frank's grilled, sliced, basted with mustard. Sam's, on Ninth below Spring Street just around the corner from Manufacturers' Bank was always crammed. There was something about my father and these few moments of wild ease drawing with the waitress, the vein along his temple relaxing for the first and last time in the day. His fork cutting the franks without bun as cleanly as he would cut cloth, that made me know I would never know anyone like him. The sheer life of him. The irreplaceable style.
• [00:10:28.38] After lunch I picked up a pattern from the pattern maker on Spring Street, inhaling the acrid ink and dies. And we used a bit, sensing in the ink, a writing life. One by one I ducked into the specialty shops for the spools and the thread and the buttons. Everything in the streets was in motion -- dresses, racks, bolts, models posteriors, the thighs of shippers. More than once I picked up a skeletal original pattern thrown off the rack by a pothole in a crosswalk, a casualty of beauty.
• [00:11:05.07] After Bobby and I had finished bagging or boxing our shipments for the day, I peered in on my father. I might see Si Harris, the piece goods salesman, running the latest swatches through Aref's fingers. My father had the hands of a pianist. He knew cloth. He lived by feel. Same here.
• [00:11:28.17] At christmas parties Dad liked to dance between the racks with Jennine, head of his [? calmart ?] showroom -- a stunning tall brunette with blue eyes. He also like to twirl the sample makers manakin, riddled with pins. Or churn it with George Wilner himself. We enthused each other, Wilner, a former professional dancer remembered. A big order made an explosion of joy, and it spread through the whole factory. If we ran out of A&B bags or a certain box size, I was sent to the 11th floor of the Cooper Building where Charm of Hollywood, the well-established rag business of my uncle's Albert and Victor Orfalea had the whole floor. Al and Vic and Aref were good to each other, rose together, sank together. Uncle Al's son would go on to start with his father's savings from the ailing rag trade, Kinko's copies. By 1977 Mr. Aref and associated labels had come undone. It was part of a cloth cataclysm that left few garment houses downtown intact. How did a world die in so short a time? There's so many reasons -- it is like trying to finger one termite for a collapsed foundation. Most relevant, perhaps, few children, and almost none of the grandchildren of the rag owners grasped the baton of the life of a sweatshop.
• [00:13:11.74] My father was plain worn out, and he let me know I was meant for better. Was I? Is it? This writer's life, is it better? And did I retreat to a large bureaucracy out of fear of the roller coaster faith of rags? None of us in the younger generation kept the cloth faith. My cousin did pretty well starting Kinko's. Huge profits and employment created, yes, but something you can wear? Can feel? My uncle Gary, the youngest son of my contractor grandfather, went to work for UniCal. There's something made there to be sure, but it's no more yours than it is the creation of hundreds of thousands of other stockholders. And how do you get your hands on a tank of gas? And me -- could I hold this article over my head? Call it a rain cap? Yet in the dark hours after making nothing but meetings all day, I stitch a book. It is made. It has weight. And it makes no money, just like all the beauty my father fabricated, finally. Do I want the reader to pull a book on like a good sweater? Yes. I want it to wear well, to comfort, to awaken, even like a good burlap, to itch.
• [00:14:52.46] Loft by loft, floor by floor, I ascend the Cooper Building. Only one manufacturer is left in the cavernous place of jobbers and ghosts. When I tell Edith Flagg who I am, her breath goes out. She remembers immediately my father's violent death a few years after he closed Mr. Aref. Back East, my wife won't take the brass button turqoise demin pantsuit the last manufacturer gave me. It has an elastic waist, she says, it's for seniors. I put it up for auction at our church's fundraiser in the spring, nobody bids. I seem to have lost that outfit, just as I did my father, without saying how beautiful everything he made was. Maybe the errant pantsuit is dancing in a closet with my father's granny dress. Maybe some widowed grandmother pulled it out of a pile, put it on and is now prowling the corridors of Congress. It was a kingdom, not a Congress. A kingdom of color, of feel, of voice, of tags. It was a kingdom of rags.
• [00:16:21.18] Any water anywhere? Water, water. No. That's OK. We're Arabs, we're used to the desert.
• [00:16:38.58] One of my father's fellow GIs in World War II who served in his battalion, the 551st parachute infantry, about which I wrote a book, Messengers of Lost Battalion, is with us tonight, Rolland [? Barheight ?] and his wife, Anita. And his daughter, Cindy. Hi, Cindy.
• [00:17:05.34] Well, I obviously -- again, it's wonderful to be here. I grew up in a manufacturing town, which is Los Angeles. Most people think it's tinsel town. But there's a lot more to LA than the Hollywood industry, and it is actually a place of quite a bit of heavy manufacturing. Everything from aerospace to, in our case, not so heavy, but the manufacturing of clothes. The center of Los Angeles was for a long time a rival to the garment district in New York City, which, of course, is quite large. So, I have great empathy for what Detroit has gone through. I was here today earlier in the day doing some consultant work at the Arab American National Museum, which is a wonderful place. My old colleague, Christen Hodges who taught with me at Stanford, in the back. She teaches here in the area on history, I believe, right? English - well, old English [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. And I told her about it today at dinner and it's a wonderful place that you must go see if you don't know it. Ron Amin has worked there for many years. It's just the best institution I think we have in the country other than, I'd say, Saint Jude's Hospital, which Danny Thomas started in Tennessee. They're going to put an exhibit on Arab Americans and military service. So we brainstormed for eight hours today and it was quite a discussion. It was very intense and very interesting. We had people from the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles that came. It was quite fascinating.
• [00:19:18.86] I thought I would read, in addition to Kingdom of Rags in whole, a little part of two other essays -- that's a fairly short piece. These two essays are longer and I couldn't try your patience with either one of them. The first one is called The Barber of Tarzana. That's what I think.
• [00:19:39.15] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:19:41.07] GREG ORFALEA: Did you? Oh, wonderful. A valley girl.
• [00:19:43.72] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:19:46.28] GREG ORFALEA: I actually have -- you're going to have to get this book for one reason.
• [00:19:50.02] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:19:51.92] GREG ORFALEA: Really, sweet. It's LA.
• [00:19:56.96] But there's an essay that I thought about reading -- shoot, maybe I should. Well, it's called Valley Boys. And it's actually, it's sort of an imaginative rendering of my growing up alongside Daniel Pearl, the Jewish guy who was killed barbarically in Pakistan. I didn't know him. But I found out, you know ex-post facto, that he grew up like a mile or two away from me -- I was grew up in Tarzana, he grew up in Encino.
• [00:20:29.98] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:20:31.62] GREG ORFALEA: Cresby.
• [00:20:31.96] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:20:34.26] GREG ORFALEA: Where did you go?
• [00:20:35.08] AUDIENCE: Providence.
• [00:20:37.58] GREG ORFALEA: Oh, you were at our dances. We'll talk later. These good people don't want to hear about our dances. You've had enough dances already, there was dancing in the first one.
• [00:20:54.85] Anyway, Valley Boys is about Daniel Pearl and I growing up together, but not knowing each other, and I tried to imaginatively understand how such a terrible thing could happen. Anyway, I'll let you read that on your own.
• [00:21:13.98] The Barber of Tarzana is abou my barber of 40 years in LA named Luigi Venti. He still cuts hair -- a little less accurately. You have to kind of dodge, but he's a wonderful man, and he cut the hair of Bud Abbott. Actually, he cut the hair of just about everybody you could imagine -- Harrison Ford when he was a kid. I'll go to him, I definitely need it probably this weekend as I'm going out to LA tomorrow. So I'll read a few pieces from The Barber of Tarzana, which I think is somewhat of a light piece. Then we'll go to the last piece, which is not, and it's called An Act of forgiveness. But let's start with The Barber of Tarzana.
• [00:22:03.75] Who is one of the longest operating barbers in California? Who once cut Al Jolson's hair? Who had his barber shop rammed by an arsonist? There's a story to that one. Who has been trying to make me stylish for 40 years without success? You're not getting any younger, it's time to comb it forward -- the Nero look. His name is Luigi Venti, 84, of Venti's Elite Barbers in Tarzana. Elite, because when you go under the Venti blade, you become part of a fraternity that stretches back to 1939, the year Luigi, also known as Louie, graduated from barber college, the youngest registered hair cutter in Los Angeles. He was 17. The elite fraternity ranges from actor Harrison Ford to Olympic champion diver, Dr. Sammy Lee -- anybody remember -- who, long ago, cut out my tonsils. It includes anyone who needed to sharpen up at risk a bloodletting in the vicinity of the Los Angeles Convention Center, 1939 to '41, Wilshire and Robertson Boulevards, '42 to '45, Burton Way and Doheny Drive, '46 to '62, and Ventura Boulevard and Corbin Avenue, '63 to the present. That's where he is now. He's right down the street from my mother. And it includes my hero, Bud Abbott. You're all familiar with Abbott and Costello. OK.
• [00:23:49.90] One day when I was a 12-year old riding a lime-green Schwinn down a phalanx of palms on Oakdale Street in Tarzana, I caught sight of him watering his modest lawn at Redwing Street. Luigi had told me "the great Abbott" lived there and I always slowed hoping to see him. That time I lucked out. Abbott was in a bathrobe holding the nozzleless drooping hose like a de-fanged snake. The "lecturer," Abbott's definition of the comic straight man -- he called it a lecturer -- looked up. I waked, Bud waved. I pedaled furiously to the barbershop where I announced my sighting. Naturally, Luigi was pleased. Had I seen the sign "Hi, neighbor" on the mailbox? No, I hadn't. Well, that was all right, next time.
• [00:24:48.28] Early on, Luigi developed a unique way to cut hair, a process he called the four-phase system. In phase one, the customer would receive a basic trim -- the clean up of the neck. In phase two, Louie would begin to cut hair, exposing the ears somewhat, taking about an inch off the top. In phase three, he would take the straight razor around the ears, producing an arc of flesh. And then came phase four, total butchery. It was at the height of his ecstasy at phase four that Louie was known to reveal scalp. A head under the Venti hand at phase four had to be ready for anything. It was his ninth, his [? pieta ?], his remembrance of things past. Luigi could make a head at phase four resemble Dresden after the firebombing. Not a hair on the head remained more than a millimeter long. For years, Louie tried to persuade me to beg off phase four. Woudn't I prefer an Ivy League blow dry? Or the fullness of the Madison Avenue cut? I knew what he was trying to do -- to avoid the ultimate pain of creating one's best. It's possible, too, that he had had it with the wrath of my mother.
• [00:26:17.24] My mother spread bad word over Louie. She liked me with short hair, mind you, but phase four? Even when I let my hair grow long for a time in college, I eventually sought out Louie for my traditional phase four, a rebellion against the rebellion. Why are you still going to him, my mother said. Why does the earth orbit the sun? Why do swallows come back to Capistrano? Louie learned the normal cut at barber college, he was done with that early. She would throw her hands up and say that I was crazy. Now flying in from the East for family and a cut, I no longer get her frowns when I mention Louie's name. Now my head is phase four. Luigi could cut me with hedging shears for all I cared. I wanted to hear him play the mandolin or accordion in his shop, and I wanted an update on Bud Abbott. I wanted the mafia jokes, the one-liners coming fast and furious with the whole barber shop his stage, customers part of the act. Let the scissors do their worst, as long as time was killed.
• [00:27:30.00] Actually, I think I'll just read you this one paragraph about Bud Abbott at the end.
• [00:27:57.46] He knows it's time to go and almost on queue, time to speak one last time about Bud Abbott. Once when he was sick, my wife and I drove to his house to give him his cut. Louie recalls looking out the window at encroaching buildings. He asked my wife to come sit next to him while I trimmed away. He was watching something on TV. It was an Abbott and Costello movie, Buck Privates. As he watched, he grew a little astonished as he watched himself driving a car. I never drove a car in my life, Abbott said. I had epilepsy. But they made me drive the car down a hill. The cameraman ran like he was going to be killed. What did he tell you about Lou Costello, I asked Luigi. Oh, no -- the man who had introduced me to Bud told me don't talk about Lou. Since Lou died, Bud ain't nobody. He laid an egg in every show he did. He was actually mad at Lou Costello for dying.
• [00:29:10.41] I don't know about you guys, but I consider who's on first, what's on second, I don't know on third one of the great acts of all time. I used to listen to it, replay it on a little tape machine that I had taped. OK, we'll end with An Act of Forgiveness. This is one of the longest, the second longest piece in the book.
• [00:29:42.60] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:29:46.95] GREG ORFALEA: No. Well, Louie gets The Barber of Tarzana. Actually, the whole book is dedicated to my uncle Gary, [? Awan ?], who I call the A, for [? Awan, ?] and he calls me the O for Orfalea. So it's for Gar, the A to this O. My mother's youngest brother -- who's been my older brother most of my life. Didn't have one.
• [00:30:16.37] Well, how to introduce this. All I can tell you is briefly I ran away from this piece for a long time. Writing Messengers of the Lost Battalion kind of opened it up a bit, but I still didn't address the situation of how my father died. I talked about it a little bit toward the end of the book, I think. I would say it took about 17 years. He died, and my sister, in 1985 within a matter of seconds. And it took the oxygen out of the family's life for a while, and even a writer is sometimes struck dumb, and I was for several years really. But this piece is an attempt -- it's a long piece and it goes through all kinds of things surrounding their deaths. But what I'm going to read you is just the beginning of An Act of Forgiveness. A middle part where I go to a gun shop. And the last part, which is where I go to the cemetery where they're buried with my mother. And I hope that'll give you kind of the range of my concerns and confrontations.
• [00:31:45.37] An Act of Forgiveness. The whole purpose of forgiveness is to become free. Whatever you don't forgive imprisons you. Marco [? Pardo ?], an old high school friend of mine, who I will be seeing tomorrow when we play in our little high school band. He's also a substance abuse counselor. 16 years before the nation's black day, our family met its own September 11th, but with no one to hunt down or indict. In the days following our catastrophe, local newspapers printed a few accounts. "Family argument turns to tragedy." But we were soon left alone to begin our years of sadness. We buried my father and sister at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City in August of 1985. Aref and Leslie.
• [00:32:51.18] So much of their lives were intertwined -- their dancing, the garments that he manufactured and she wore. Their long parallel falls from grace and their deaths. For most of those 16 years, forgiveness for the person who sealed their fate was the last thing on my mind. Despite advice to the contrary, people who are unable to forgive create cut-offs and these can be lethal. A family therapist once told me it affects your children and your grandchildren. But I could not hear him. Forgiveness, as our family physician reminded me, is not only central to a healthy life, it is "one of the only ways we can approach God." He went on to say that whatever man endeavors to do, God does one better -- we make a building, he makes a flower. But in forgiving we engage in something God-like.
• [00:34:02.54] We have a general sense of forgiveness as caving in. But forgiveness is central to the Judeo Christian Islamic tradition. In the Old Testament, fire-breathing Jeremiah hears his maker declare, "I will forgive their inequity and I will remember their sin no more." Forgiveness is the very load stone of the New Testament, from the prodigal son to the Lord's prayer itself, who's only repeated verb is "forgive." Right up to the cross where Christ exonerates his murders -- "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." That's Luke, Chapter 23.
• [00:34:46.15] My old childhood schoolmate and substance abuse counselor, Marco [? Pardo ?] comments, "Christ does not want to die with a poisoned heart." And the Koran makes it clear. "God is much-forgiving a dispenser of grace." Surah [? O ?] [? imron, ?] Chapter 3, verse 86 to 91.
• [00:35:09.64] Still, the years did not soften my resolve. But the agony of a nation did. Whether the Al Quada terrorists are hunted down completely, whether the last bandit is snuffed out, the survivors of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fields of Pennsylvania may arrive, if they haven't already, where I arrived in 2002. For the first time since the deaths of my father and sister, I found myself cresting a hill at Holy Cross Cemetery amid the drum of the cars below on the San Diego Freeway, and the sound of my own feet avoiding the graves of strangers. I weighed the enormity of my family's loss and finally allowed myself to wonder about what can be forgiven and what cannot.
• [00:36:21.29] August 2, 1985. It was a Friday. I had just gotten home after work, looking forward to playing with our newborn boy, who was lolling with his mother on our bed in a small brick row house in Washington, D.C. The phone rang. My first reaction to what my brother said, "Greg, I'll need you now for the rest of my life" was to laugh. That sort of sentimentality didn't seem like him. I even laughed when he spat out that our sister had shot and killed our father at the family store and then killed herself. A co-worker and a customer had managed to crawl out through the front door, he said. I assumed it was one of his attempts to catch me off guard, so I waited for the punch line. There was none. Only the silence and heavy breathing of someone who is pricing each inhale for the first time in his life.
• [00:37:40.84] I'm skipping. There's a section here where we have to get my mother home. My mother was in England at the time and her first trip abroad visiting Gary, who the book is dedicated to. And over the -- you know, we didn't have cell phones then. It was -- what would it be? Cable phone line -- we discussed -- it was the middle of the night -- how to get her back without having her have a heart attack. So we had to lie to her, or we had to restrict the truth, and we said that -- and I try and go through this whole thing -- you know, basically, tell her he was in an accident and to get her on the plane, and don't tell her anything more. So Gary came all the way from Britain with her to Los Angeles with her sitting next to him in the plane saying, "What else do you know?" And apparently, he would turn away from her and just--.
• [00:38:59.37] I'm going to take you now to the gun store where my sister bought the gun. There is a whole section in this thing about gun control, and we got very active. But I'm going to skip over and go right to the source.
• [00:39:21.56] Some years after our dark day in August, I walked alone into National Gun Sales, off by itself in the dust on a dry stretch of Parthenia Boulevard along the railroad tracks. What hits you in a gun shop right off is this sheer number of weapons. Shotguns and assault rifles spread along the walls like wings of a forbidding flock. I dawdled for a while at one of the racks of magazines and books dealing with hunting, shooting, explosives, soldiers of fortune, "men without women," as Hemingway once called them.
• [00:40:08.11] What did my sister feel coming into this dark den? Did she know she was entering her death? Did she think the gun would melt and enwrap her like a protective cloak? From the ammo boxes, the clerk came, seeing me staring at a .38 Smith Wesson. "Nice piece of equipment," he said, quietly. "Uhhuh." "You want to see it?" "All right." He brought it out of the light and layed it slowly on the glass, just enough for the trigger guard to tick. It was cool -- a butt pocked for a good grip, not light. "Feel good?" "Yeah." I wanted to buy a gun for the first time in my life. "You'll like it, no one ever brings one back." "Uhhuh." Something in the way he spoke and moved, back toward the ammo under the gun wings, arms folded like the director of the universe, made me touch the box of cartridges. He moved directions on an orange card in front of me like a draw card to an inside straight. "There's a shooting range down the block, if you want to try it out. They've got them there." "Sure." The door opened on the light, the light shined in the darkness, and the darkness grasped it.
• [00:41:54.82] And this is the end.
• [00:42:05.23] The rind of a decade and a half cracked first at the library shootings at Littleton Colorado and then was shattered by September 11th. An inner wall had been hit by the axe of mass violence. [? Coughgut ?] took such violence metaphorically as the purpose of literature and acts at the frozen heart.
• [00:42:27.70] That's how I came to be threading my way through the lids of the dead at Holy Cross Cemetery in 2002. On that gusty, bright February morning, the wind was a hand. For all the justifiable outrage over bin Laden and his henchmen, the hue and cry had begun to make me wonder about the nature of revenge. Yes, they need to be brought to justice. But more than half the battle in staving off a recurrence of such heinous acts is to try and understand why they happen in the first place and to do something about the milleau of deprivation, injustice and hatred that brings people to such an abyss. We need to look at the history of the region and our poor part in it. Slamming the door on terror through force is not nearly enough and may in itself reap a bitter harvest.
• [00:43:34.07] I finally realized that I couldn't begin to think of forgiveness until I look closely at the human face that took my loved ones. The history of that face and the depths of despair that mental illness brought it, brought to it. I had to face my sister in the way I have been given to confront such things, through writing.
• [00:44:00.81] At the cemetery, my mother filled a jug of water at the tap by the road and handed it to me. It was my first time there since our loved ones were killed 17 years before. Mother carried with her two miniature rose bushes, one yellow, one fire engine red. It took awhile to find the graves. "I always get lost," she said, angling from the Grotto of Saint Joseph down through the grave stones searching for her marker sycamore. We past a replica of the [? pieta ?] and I thought did my sister hold my father in her arms?
• [00:44:43.96] When she spotted the tree, mother walked straight to their graves, two black stone markers side by side like a table setting for two. She knelt, and with the cloth, wiped the markings of snails, dead insects and dirt. Soon the darkness shown below her knotted hand. I busied myself, uprooting the shaggy grass along the edges of the black stones, just as my father used to do for his parents' graves here, as if you could tidy sorrow. The crab grass was thicker on Leslie's grave. Mom gave me her scissors, but I said I needed a spade and she produced one. We placed the two small pots side by side -- red for dad, yellow for Les, and watered this bridge between them before arching our backs to pray.
• [00:45:39.25] My father's grave reads, "Aref Joseph Orfalea, beloved father and husband, 1924-1985, Go get 'em." That last was his favorite imperative to all who would truly live and I was glad to see it. Then I caught the figure on Leslie's grave. An angel kneeling, hands clasped, wings drawn up. The prayer etched there startled me. "May you be dancing in a light of God." It was a less profane, more redeptive version of Father Columba's eulogy, "Leslie and Aref are dancing with the angels" that had struck me back then as impossible, even absurd. Mother had produced a spiritual upgrade, a sign of her instinctive forgiveness, and she had done it very early on.
• [00:46:46.13] I hadn't. I had held my anger like a stone as black as their graves. But that day, the words fell out of me. "I forgive you, sister." Forgive me -- the grades, the anger, the judgment, the distance, the dirt. I also said to myself, "forgive God." When I stood up facing West it was colder. A cloud had covered the sun. I looked straight ahead. There, downhill through a hole in a stand of eucalyptus, past the San Diego Freeway and the town of Inglewood was the sea. It shined like a melted coin. If I moved slightly to the left or to the right of either of their graves, it disappeared. I pointed this out to mother who smiled and said she'd never seen it before, had never looked beyond their graves that way. We both agreed it was a great vantage point, almost worth 17 years of heartache to discover. She muttered something about poet's seeing beauty everyone else misses. A shaft of light came through the cloud. It touched on a Saint Joseph statue and slowly crept across the grass. I thought, of course -- well, on queue, huh.
• [00:48:33.04] Let me start over that paragraph. A shaft of light came across the cloud. It touched on a Saint Joseph statue and slowly crept across the grass. I thought, of course, that it was leading to us. Then I took my shadow off and walked with mother back to the road.
• [00:49:00.93] Thank you.
• [00:49:09.92] BETH MANUEL: Does anybody have any questions or comments?
• [00:49:15.12] GREG ORFALEA: Yeah, Ron.
• [00:49:16.65] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] you're pretty confident then that California is not going to break off and fall in the ocean.
• [00:49:23.45] GREG ORFALEA: Yeah, I think it's going to be there for a while.
• [00:49:27.53] AUDIENCE: How long have you been back in California now?
• [00:49:29.58] GREG ORFALEA: Well, I actually was teaching there for three years -- 2004 to 2007, but I came back two years ago. I just simply say it was a health issue of my wife partly that brought me back. But I still want to come back West. We'll get there.
• [00:50:03.07] AUDIENCE: Is it the first book for you? Is it [UNINTELLIGIBLE] before you to help others also you wrote this book?
• [00:50:09.66] GREG ORFALEA: Is it my first book? No, it's my eighth. I think in some ways it contains the hardest writing for me. I mean the stuff that was difficult to--.
• [00:50:22.93] AUDIENCE: To help yourself and help other people in your situation.
• [00:50:24.88] GREG ORFALEA: Yes. Well, I have to say that in all honesty, my mother never read it, The Act of Forgiveness when it was first published in the Los Angeles Times magazine. And she never read it when it went in here -- well, no, I take that back. It was published in the LA Times magazine in 2003 -- this just came out this year. About four years past, maybe two years ago, before the book came out, we had quite an argument about whether it would go in. And I had to pass certain phrases through my brother. She wouldn't -- I'd give it to my brother and he'd take the phrase and show it to her and she'd try and do something with it. That was a very difficult thing to describe, my sister's mental illness, which was schizophrenia. She didn't want that word in, you can imagine. [? Iba ?] [? shoom, ?] right, in Arabic -- shame on you. But you're right. About two years ago, maybe seven years or so, six years, five years after it appeared in the Times, she read it. She just got up the courage, and she called me and said, "I read your piece." I couldn't believe it. I didn't think she was ever going to confront it. I said, "Well, what did you think?" The longest silence in my life. And she said, "It was very difficult, but I think it will help other people." Well, you couldn't ask for--.
• [00:51:55.74] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:51:56.52] GREG ORFALEA: I think we're probably not alone. But it's particularly difficult for us for some reason. I don't know why, frankly. Maybe you have some insights about that. Carol? Anything?
• [00:52:14.05] CAROL: I think knowing issues in my own family that there's something about, in our culture, the family is the family. And we--.
• [00:52:27.05] GREG ORFALEA: Protective.
• [00:52:27.84] CAROL: We protect what we know.
• [00:52:31.03] GREG ORFALEA: Yeah.
• [00:52:32.63] CAROL: And also I think being minorities in a majority culture, we don't want to reveal anything wrong.
• [00:52:45.21] GREG ORFALEA: Any cracks in the psod. Yeah, I think there's some truth to that.
• [00:52:50.19] Yes?
• [00:52:50.66] AUDIENCE: I think American culture is incredibly blind to illness that's mental.
• [00:52:57.69] GREG ORFALEA: Mental illness, yeah.
• [00:52:58.34] AUDIENCE: And I think -- the issue's come up since I've been living in Ann Arbor with some family members, and I think, again, it's my only experience, but sometimes I wonder the more educated the town, the less that they want to--.
• [00:53:12.63] GREG ORFALEA: Huh.
• [00:53:13.49] AUDIENCE: --Identify that. You know it's like Lake Wobegon -- we only have perfect children and everything's wonderful here.
• [00:53:20.89] GREG ORFALEA: We all have high IQs and that should take care of it all.
• [00:53:24.44] AUDIENCE: Right. So we're perfect and have no problems. And I think, in fact, if people were just honest about it and did share, it's very painful and you go through this whole thing, it's myself fault--.
• [00:53:35.84] GREG ORFALEA: Oh yeah.
• [00:53:36.39] AUDIENCE: --It's nobody's fault, it's just what it is.
• [00:53:37.90] GREG ORFALEA: An illness.
• [00:53:39.03] AUDIENCE: But it is, it's very, very difficult, and I commend you because I think it is very difficult--.
• [00:53:43.47] GREG ORFALEA: Thank you, thank you.
• [00:53:45.27] AUDIENCE: --To share our sorrow.
• [00:53:48.75] GREG ORFALEA: As this woman here intimated it, it helped me, believe me, as much, if not more, than it would help anyone else. A thousand pounds off the shoulder when I finally wrote it.
• [00:54:03.01] Ron?
• [00:54:03.51] RON: Greg, had your sister been diagnosed? Was she under any kind of treatment at the time? Good medication, therapy, whatever?
• [00:54:12.08] GREG ORFALEA: Well, there's a whole section about her menal illness difficulties. But I'll say, Ron, she had been to a mental hospital. She heard voices. That's the classic beginning of schizophrenia, and it often happens in the late teens, early 20s. It hit her when she was 20 and a junior at college. And we did all these experiments trying to figure out was it in her ears, was it her diet? You know, you try everything, and finally you realize something else. She went through a 10 year period of slow downward spiral -- it was agony for my parents, for all of us. But particularly for my parents. Curiously enough, the word schizophrenia was never used until she was gone. And I discovered it in hospital records. Her psychiatrist -- she was in a mental hospital for eight months at one point. In the seventh month it enters the record. Why so late? And, obviously, he never communicated to my mother and father because they never used the word. It was low, depressed. She had medications at various times, she had different therapists at various times--.
• [00:55:31.16] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:55:34.29] GREG ORFALEA: Well, the deaths occurred in '85, but she started hearing voices in '75, I think -- roughly '75. So, no, they didn't have it really diagnosed. They knew she could be violent though, and it's in the piece. I confront--.
• [00:55:57.58] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:55:58.89] GREG ORFALEA: I think the medicines now probably are much better than they were. She threw her medicines away, which is not uncommon even today, but they have less side effects today.
• [00:56:10.18] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:56:11.30] GREG ORFALEA: Sure. And I have a hunch, you know, sad to say, that maybe, maybe she might have been able to be saved. But I threatened my folks at one point when she sort of stalked down the hallway between the bedrooms of the family home one night and banged on my door when I was sleeping. I opened the door, it was like 2:00 in the morning, and she was standing there and she went -- and started yelling at me. She put something behind her back -- I'm convinced it was a gun. And I came that close. Actually, at the time I thought it was a knife because I couldn't think of my sister with a gun? But knowing the way things happened, she actually had purchased two guns at two different times. And the fact that she could get it. In the midst of a psychotic event with her eyes dialated and staccato speech and a bloody hand blows my mind.
• [00:57:14.10] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:57:17.79] GREG ORFALEA: Well, Cho -- look what Cho did at Virginia Tech.
• [00:57:22.53] So, we haven't learned much on that score. It's just this absolute shame.
• [00:57:27.91] Yes, Carol.
• [00:57:29.40] CAROL: What I find so compelling about that poem -- I mean of course I'm saddened for your loss and I'm--.
• [00:57:39.10] GREG ORFALEA: Thank you. Thank you.
• [00:57:41.78] CAROL: --How could I say -- I don't know the word, not a poet, but I'm heartened that you could write about it and get over that. But it's the forgiveness part that has such a deep spiritual message for me. The days that I don't forgive over stupid little things--.
• [00:58:04.05] GREG ORFALEA: Oh, yes, I've done it with my kids.
• [00:58:05.81] CAROL: --And then even politically the forgiveness about political events that anger me. This is just -- where you have arrived is where I think so many of us want to be. I'm not saying you're there completely on every issue--.
• [00:58:24.43] GREG ORFALEA: It's a life--.
• [00:58:24.82] CAROL: --It's a process.
• [00:58:25.61] GREG ORFALEA: --Life long. It's interesting you say that. I really appreciate you saying that.
• [00:58:29.59] CAROL: But I really appreciate your writing.
• [00:58:32.81] GREG ORFALEA: Well, I had a response from a man who -- do you know Ben Beitin? He was with us in Kansas State. Ben Beitin, Dr. Ben Bateen or Beitin. it's a Syrian name. He teaches psychology at Seton Hall, and he is a psychotherapist, remember? He's a very interesting guy. He's been emailing me after reading this piece. I don't know if I should share this. Pretty private. Well, let's just say that somebody in his family took their own life, and he's been trying to understand it his whole life. And he said the process you went -- he keeps asking what was the process. It's hard to say. There's many false starts. I shut off seeing their graves -- that probably didn't help. Going with my mother was a good idea. Going with someone who's stronger, who was stronger. I ked Ben, do you have a sister, your wife, whatever.
• [00:59:37.98] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:59:41.68] GREG ORFALEA: And I was angry her for doing that, because it was an indication she was on another level and I wasn't there. I also thought she was dismissing what had happened to my father in a way, but she didn't. She was something, she is something. She is an amazing human being.
• [01:00:05.09] AUDIENCE: I just want to, like Carol said, about forgiveness. So many people, if ask them for forgiveness -- I mean without forgiveness, it affect them badly, and this will help them a lot to read this story and how you suffered, and how you reach a point of forgiveness and to help others, really. I really appreciate what you did. Thank you.
• [01:00:36.36] GREG ORFALEA: Yes.
• [01:00:36.71] AUDIENCE: I don't know if I find it frightening or it just shows we're all human before we're a professional, but that a psychotherapist doesn't know or a psychiatrist. I mean that just shows how personal that is and everything you learn is blocked off.
• [01:00:55.93] GREG ORFALEA: The psychiatrist she had at the end, after she had--.
• [01:00:59.40] AUDIENCE: Yeah, your friend.
• [01:01:00.50] GREG ORFALEA: Oh, my friend's Ben Beitin. Yeah. And you know who he treats? He's got a very unusual practice, which is why he was at Kansas State. We went to a conference, Carol and I together, on Arab American women about--.
• [01:01:11.98] AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
• [01:01:14.01] GREG ORFALEA: No. That's another story. He, Ben, counsels people, largely people of middle Eastern background, although not entirely, who were thrown into prison willy-nilly right after 9/11, spent months or years and had no charges filed and came out bleary-eyed wondering what happened to their life. You can imagine the trauma. No guilt, no charges, just thrown in prison. And that happened to 2,000 people from what we've been able to gather. That's a lot of people in a free society where there's a writ of Habeus Corpus. So, Ben challenges himself. I mean he has a practice dealing with extremely difficult cases psychologically. And yet, as you say, he still has some difficulties of his own, as we all do.
• [01:02:13.48] BETH MANUEL: Any other questions? AUDIENCE:
• [01:02:16.74] I'm probably the only person here who doesn't know you, right, but I grew up in the same area. Would you mind giving me a little bio, like OK, so you grew up in LA, where did you go to undergrad, where'd you're go to grad?
• [01:02:31.86] GREG ORFALEA: Oh, sure. I grew up in LA, born and raised downtown at 3rd and Alvaretto, Saint Vincent's Hospital, and raised in Anaheim, then over to the valley when I was 12. I saw the Mattahorn being built at Disneyland when I was a kid. I've written a short story about it called The Portrait of the Artist in Disneyland's Shadow. New Book's coming out this year with that at the head, short stories. Went to Georgetown -- that's what brought me back East. Our group of students, we had about six or seven of us from Crestpie High who went East. We were the first group of graduates who ever went East of the Mississippi. One guy went to West Point. One guy went to Yale -- [? Eric Clausterman, ?] our valedictorian. Two of us went to Georgetown and I can't remember what -- oh, a couple went to Notre Dame. And we kept in touch with each, used to hitchhike and visit each other. We were the Westerners in the East. And I went to Alaska, of all places, for my Masters in Fine Arts and Creative Writing. In those days there was only seven programs for creative writing in the Masters level. There are now 100. Just an explosion.
• [01:03:52.00] AUDIENCE: What made you decide to go to Alaska for your MFA?
• [01:03:54.51] GREG ORFALEA: Boy, I've been asked that question many times and I don't have a great answer to it.
• [01:04:00.33] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:04:00.93] GREG ORFALEA: Yeah, well that really -- to be honest with you, that's the answer because I applied it two places, Iowa, which is the Harvard of the writing programs, right. I didn't get in. And I got in a full ride, full cross-country ski in Alaska. I always was fascinated with the far North for a Californian. We spent time in a cabin, my father had bought us a cabin when we were growing up in the lower Sierra's near Lake Arrowhead. And I kind of like the snow, which was a bit unusual. And I kind of liked the idea of living out in the woods. I was very influenced by Thoreau, as most of my generation was and writers of that sort. Annie Dillard became someone I liked quite a bit. I lived out in a cabin with no running water for a year with no one else within a mile. Crazy things you do when you're 22.
• [01:04:58.97] CAROL: Greg, have you had difficulty finding publishers interested in your work?
• [01:05:07.75] GREG ORFALEA: Good question, Carol. I didn't read from it, but there is an essay -- this book is divided in half.
• [01:05:16.16] CAROL: The reason I ask that is because we're Arab American [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:05:19.03] GREG ORFALEA: Right. Well, I wanted to mention, Carol, that half the book -- the first half is memoirs of growing up in LA and it's not particularly ethnic, although it kind of comes in and out in the Kingdom of Rags. The second half are a lot of essays about the Middle East and my background. And one of the essays is called Facing The Wall. What's the subtitle -- Arab Americans in publishing. So, I took a couple of chances--.
• [01:05:45.99] AUDIENCE: Could you read it?
• [01:05:48.12] GREG ORFALEA: It's kind of long. I'll summarize one or two things. I kind of got up enough nerve to speak out on a couple of things in this book in addition to mental illness. And one of them is that first you gotta say, you have to say right off the bat when you're talking about discrimination in publishing, that is just very hard to publish a good book. Anybody, no matter what your background in this country. This is a country with universal education, although maybe it's devolving rather than evolve. But for the most part, people -- there's a lot of educated people who go to these hundred writing programs. Competition is stiff is what I mean to say. So having said that, I was asked by -- actually, ADC, Arab American Anti-discrimination Committee asked me to speak on this topic, and that's where I got the impetus to write it up.
• [01:06:53.99] I had a couple of incidents, and I'll tell you one or two that really shocked me in a way and in some ways silenced me for a while. And I know if it happened to me, it's probably happened to others. I know of no other writer who's been able to pin it down though because it's risky to say this, and you don't want to sound like you're whining. But years ago I had written part of a novel, maybe about half of a novel or a third. It was called Mirage, and it was set in 1936 in Palestine, in Haifa, actually, where I've never been. So it was perfect for fiction since I had no idea what it looked like. I made it up. Did some reading. It was the story of a Jewish Arab marriage, Arab Jewish inter-marriage and the four children from that inter-marriage. And I kind of told the Israel Palestine conflict through these four dual-heritage children. An old ploy -- and Shakespeare did plenty with his kind of double-heritage and whatnot, mistaken identities. So, it wasn't very original, but I had some fun with it and I think I learned some things writing it. I had an agent named Elaine Markson -- Jewish agent, very good. She loved it. She said this is going to be an event. I'll never forget her saying that.
• [01:08:29.12] I said now, wait a second -- forget the event, Elaine, just get it published. Forget the event. Sure enough, she was good at what she did. She got it on the desk of the top fiction editor at Old Little Brown, whose name was Fredericka Freidman -- her name was Freddie Freidman, nicknamed Freddie Freidman. Yeah. Freddie, Fredericka Freidman had been the editor of Shogun. Remember Shogun? Very successful, highly successful novel about Japan. So, Freddie Freidman called me one day, and I still kind of have difficulty thinking did this really -- come on, Greg, are you remembering it right, because it sounds so outrageous. But I'm afraid I do remember. She said, Mr. Orfalea, you are about an interesting, fascinating mission. I said Miss Freidman, I'm not about any mission, I just write about my obsessions and I try and follow where they take me. I'm not on a mission. And she said, well, I think you're right. Very well, and this is a fascinating story but I'm not going to publish it. I said really, you called me to tell me that? That's really nice of you. What a friendly thing to do. And I said, may I ask why? And she said because of who you are. I put my hand on the Bible, I said, no. I had this temptation to say, who am I? Tell me, who am I? But I said something like can you explain that, please? And she said, look, if you were Jewish and you wrote this story people would believe it. But because you're not, they're not going to believe it.
• [01:10:31.29] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [01:10:34.50] GREG ORFALEA: No. I won't do that, particularly with a book like that. Psyeudomum. I just don't do it. Maybe thinking back on it maybe I should have, I was a little too overly principle. I don't think Fredericka Freidman was saying that it was a bad book. I don't think she was saying that she didn't want to publish it. I think she was making a statement about the market and -- as a matter of fact, it was an Arab American writing about this union, there was a credibility factor, what was my motive? Was I manipulating things? In other words, I could not be a reliable narrator. De facto. And that really bothered me. And it stopped me writing for a while.
• [01:11:33.83] Really?
• [01:11:34.45] AUDIENCE: Some young lady who [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Jewish comments like that. And she said that you were -- she's disappointed reading book because you were not fair [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
• [01:11:47.38] GREG ORFALEA: That's, you hear that--. There are a lot of Jews that are called antisematic because they criticize Israel. I want to say one thing. Needless to say I don't feel like I have to say this, but some of the best friends to my work have been Jewish, particularly my editor at Simon Schuster, Adam Bellow -- Saul Bellow's son. Knew me, knew what I was doing instinctively. So I'm not saying that every time I've been presented with this problem that I get hit back by one of my cousins. No. But it happened that time and something--.
• [01:12:28.55] BETH MANUEL: There's a question back here. GREG ORFALEA: Yes, sir.
• [01:12:30.51] AUDIENCE: I wanted to ask you some questions, but maybe you're [UNINTELLIGIBLE], when you started out your lecture -- I'm sorry I was a little bit--.
• [01:12:39.10] GREG ORFALEA: Not at all, no problem.
• [01:12:40.67] AUDIENCE: --I live on the South side of town.
• [01:12:42.04] GREG ORFALEA: Well, it's nice that you came all that way.
• [01:12:44.54] AUDIENCE: We got a little bit lost. But anyway, can you say something about the Arab population in general in Los Angeles area? When did they immigrate to an area for what reason, from what country. And your own family--.
• [01:13:02.67] GREG ORFALEA: Yeah. It's a big community. Right now it's sort of neck and neck between Detroit and LA, although some demographers think that LA has begin to pass Detroit. I guess they use the 400,000 figure for Detroit, I think, and Dearborn -- well, Dearborn and then the metro area. And LA, I don't know.
• [01:13:23.58] AUDIENCE: In LA there's [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Iranians.
• [01:13:26.13] GREG ORFALEA: No, no. The Iranians are 600,000. The Iranians are bigger than the Arab Americans in LA. That's why they call it Irangeles. Anyway, to answer the gentleman's question. People came to the west fairly early on from the Arab world. One of the first immigrants was a Muslim named Hai Ali, who was nicknamed Hi Jolly.
• [01:13:49.24] AUDIENCE: Was that the 19th Century or what?
• [01:13:52.29] GREG ORFALEA: He came in the 19th century. About 1865, something like that, and he came as a camel driver, literally. Taking camels -- the U.S. Army hired him to take the camels across Texas through the Southwest thinking that they were going to open up a trail of camels. But the problem was that the camels, you know, padded foot was used to sand, not hard stones. And they cut their feet up so badly, the poor camels ran away. I think some of them ran away, or they weren't good for packing supplies. There were people that came later from Lebanon, particularly in Syria. Lebanese and Syrians and to some extent Palestinians made up 90% of the first wave--.
• [01:14:44.69] AUDIENCE: Mostly Christians?
• [01:14:45.47] GREG ORFALEA: Most, 90% Christian, yeah.
• [01:14:49.92] AUDIENCE: Maronite?
• [01:14:50.31] GREG ORFALEA: Maronite, Orthodox, Melkite. Right. My family was actually both Orthodox and Melkite. My grandmother Nazera Orfalea was Melkite. There was evidence of a very early farmer coming to California in around 1918 after World War I where he saw starvation in Lebanon. Lebanon lost about a quarter of its population to starvation in World War I -- that's not known very well. That's a lot of people. This gentleman's name was Hadad. Why am I forgetting his first name, I grew up with him. He was like [? amul ?], an old uncle. [? Tofeke ?] Hadad -- I can't remember his first name. But anyway, he was responsive as the potato king. He was responsible for selling Safeway half of its spring potatoes. He had all these potato farms in Idaho, as well as in California. The community grew exponentially after World War II -- that's when my family came from Cleveland, Ohio, my father's family, and from Brooklyn, New York my mother's family, for various reasons, one of which was health. My grandfather had bad emphysema and he needed to go to a sunshine. They checked out Florida and as my grandmother, his wife put it, honey, we didn't go to Florida because they had sunshine and no business. In California they have sunshine and business.
• [01:16:26.34] AUDIENCE: She was from Lebanon?
• [01:16:30.44] GREG ORFALEA: She was from Lebanon. He was from Syria, although it was all Syrian--.
• [01:16:34.09] AUDIENCE: Lebanon was part of [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
• [01:16:37.03] GREG ORFALEA: It was until 19 roughly 43. Right. At that time they were part of the same province.
• [01:16:47.15] BETH MANUEL: We will have time for one more question and then, Greg, you're going to be able to sign some books, right?
• [01:16:51.45] GREG ORFALEA: I'd be happy to, yeah.
• [01:16:53.26] BETH MANUEL: Do you have a question?
• [01:16:56.30] AUDIENCE: I was just going to ask Greg from what part of Lebanon and Syria.
• [01:17:01.88] GREG ORFALEA: My grandfather, Orfalea, Aref senior was from [? Humfs ?], although there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that Orfelea is Minerfea, which is in Southeastern Turkey and that we might be partly Armenian. Nobody knows for sure. It came down to [? Humfs. ?] OK. So then his wife [? Jabale ?] was from [? Zaflea ?], [? Nazera ?] [? Jabale. ?] And then on my mother's side my grandfather [? Kamul ?] was from outside Damascus, Arbene. They were all farmers, really, in the ole world. And then his wife, [? Matiel, ?] was from higher up the Lebanon mountain from [? Dakfaya ?], like it was called [? Shrene ?] from [? Mahiti, ?] it was a tiny little village up in the Lebanon mountain.
• [01:18:00.24] BETH MANUEL: Well, thank you very much for sharing, and it was really interesting.
• [01:18:04.74] GREG ORFALEA: Thank you. Good to be here.
• [01:18:11.06] [MUSIC]