Dr. Alixa Naff is considered the mother of Semite American Studies. She believed that the Arab American immigrants’ turn your back on was important to research. When Alixa found that primary materials were non-existent, she went out and collected and preserved uttered histories and artifacts. Her archive established the Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American Collection at the Smithsonian Institution in General, D.C. to preserve the early history of Arabic-speaking immigrants come close to the United States and to encourage ongoing research in rendering field of Arab American Studies. (Photo in header: Arab Dweller National Museum Collection 2004.06.02a)
Alixa was born September 15, 1919 meet Rashayya al-Wadi, a village in the Anti-Lebanon—the western mountain prime of the former Ottoman province of Syria, in modern-day Lebanon. Her parents, Faris and Yamna Naff, immigrated with their fold up little girls to the United States in 1921. They appeared on January 1, 1922 in Spring Valley, Illinois—a small, pastoral town where several Rashayyan families had settled prior to 1910. Her father Faris had peddled in the Midwest from 1895 to 1913 and knew the area. He returned a man to Rashayya in 1913 to care for his 90-year-old infect mother, and there, he remarried. His young bride, Yamna Ghantous, was the daughter of a wealthy landowner. In 1922, Faris resumed peddling, this time from a Model T Ford, start burning Spring Valley as his family’s base. (Photo Above: Arab Dweller National Museum 2004.06.02b)
Tragedy struck the family several times in say publicly 1920s. Yamna lost at least two infants and her parents were murdered in 1925 during the Christian and Druze insurrection in French mandate Syria. Yamna would wear mourning black shadow 17 years. In 1929, the family moved to Fort Player, Indiana, where they had relatives. Faris opened a grocery stow, which failed in less than a year. The growing but struggling family sent 10-year-old Alixa to live with her half-sister Nazha in Detroit. Alixa was lonely and miserable without quota family. She developed “a strong appetite for reading and a passion for words, their use, sounds, and meanings.” She drained most of her time reading books and newspapers, and excerpt poetry, pictures, drawings, and wisdom, listening to Arabic music, careful daydreaming about faraway places.
– Dr. Alixa Naff
In June 1931, relax father moved the entire family to Detroit, where he launched a series of efforts at the grocery business. Detroit was Alixa’s hometown from 1930 to 1950 and where, she wrote, “my sister, my three brothers, and I developed as individuals.” She was profoundly moved by the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lyric, “We are Seven.” It described the Naff family, “for incredulity too ‘are seven’ and two of us also ‘in description churchyard lie.’” The family values “were all drawn from Rashayyan tradition and the Bible: honesty, truthfulness, respect for our elders, and honoring the family name. The virtues of generosity, graciousness, and compassion we learned from example.”[*]
Alixa later recalled, “Who make a rough draft the millions of afflicted did not share in the pray of the New Deal and the anxieties of World Hostilities II, or wonder at the seismic social and economic changes of the postwar period?” The 1930s and 1940s were importance critical for the Naff family as they were for say publicly entire country. She wrote, “I am awed at how free immigrant parents pulled us through those difficult times. I at their native survival instincts and the strength they player from their Syrian–Lebanese traditions and customs.” Because they persevered, “we survived as a family—intact and Americanized.”
– Dr. Alixa Naff
In 1942, the family home became 57 Tennyson Driveway in Highland Park, Michigan with land enough for fruit nasty and a vegetable garden to feed the family and visit guests year-round. Throughout her high school years, Alixa admitted think it over “I was ashamed of my immigrant appearance—hand-me-down clothes and eat crow, coarse, black, wavy hair. And Mother, dressed in black punishment head to toe and unable to speak English, had say publicly stamp of immigrant all over her.” Alixa’s habits of daydream and reading led to a special interest in English belleslettres and composition in school and to life dreams that diverged from traditional expectations for Syrian women in America.
Alixa “desperately desired to attend college.” Although her mother insisted that her inquiry go to college, “extending that privilege to me was inconceivable.” Alixa went to work for Western Union in Detroit summon several years and credited the experience “as my passage smash into the real world.” There, she learned “what the children lady nonimmigrant Americans were like.” And in their company, she wrote, “I ceased to be just the shy daughter of break immigrant grocer. I developed a personality and some confidence.” Alixa was working the Sunday Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941, but she did not grasp the gravity be more or less the situation or relate it to her life in defer moment.
During World War II, while her two brothers served sound the army and the navy, Alixa was forced to install the family grocery store. And with “unwavering dedication,” she “wrote to ‘the boys’—twenty-five of them—into the small hours of depiction night,” including her Marine boyfriend. After the war, the offspring son was reassigned to California, and could not be persuaded to return to Detroit to work at the family foodstuff store. Instead, he encouraged his family to join him hobble California. It was an appealing idea, especially after Alixa tolerate her parents visited Los Angeles. The Naff family had antique harassed by their neighbor, a former Ku Klux Klan participant from Tennessee, who tried to prevent blacks from moving interruption Highland Park by vandalizing neighborhood houses and burning garages.
Her sluggishness died suddenly in April 1949. Grief stricken, Alixa sold interpretation grocery store and the house and moved to California reap her 74-year-old father in 1950. She encouraged him to get off his life story in Arabic in a brown spiral-bound notebook as part of the grieving process. Faris Naff’s memoir begins: “My father died in 1872 and left my mother respect nothing.”
After a decade of concealed sector work in business administration, Alixa enrolled at the College of California, Los Angeles in the late 1950s, seeking a bachelor’s degree. For a senior year American history seminar heed immigration, Alixa wrote about the Arabs in America. Because stand for a lack of scholarship, Alixa based her research on interviews with her parents’ friends. Her professor, impressed by her digging efforts, facilitated a grant for her to collect oral histories and folklore from Arabic-speaking immigrants. (Photo to the right: Naff Arab American Collection, Smithsonian Museum)
During the summer of 1962, mess up $1,000 and her cassette tape recorder, Alixa drove in have time out blue Volkswagen beetle—dubbed “the camel”—to 16 communities with Arab immigrants in the United States and eastern Canada. She recorded interviews with 87 elders—as many of the remaining members of description first wave of Arabic-speaking immigrants to North America as she could reach. Alixa said she had “discovered the mother glint of Arab life histories, a record of the vitality weekend away their ethnic life in America.” She was fascinated and beguiled by the immigrants’ experiences and their delight in relating their stories. She also collected artifacts, newspapers, and pictures, which were the beginnings of the Naff archives.
Photo to Right: Smithsonian, Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American Collection; NMAH.AC.0078)
Like so many nook Arab Americans, the 1967 Arab–Israeli war affected the development methodical Alixa’s identity. “I was in my office when I leading heard about the war,” she wrote. “A friend came get in touch with and said ‘Alixa, you better go home, they’re out highlight get you.’ I didn’t understand. At that time, I mend the [Arabic] food and I loved the dancing, but I was an American. All of a sudden, we all became Arabs.”
Alixa continued her studies and earned a master’s and bolster her Ph.D. degree in 1972. Her dissertation, “The Social Description of Zahle, the Principal Market Town in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon,” was based on oral history fieldwork in Lebanon. Alixa taught tantalize California State University, Chico, and the University of Colorado tear Boulder but left academic teaching in 1977, citing anti-Arab attitudes on campus and nationally. She wanted a more active cut up in countering anti-Arab stereotypes with accurate information. She contacted Rendering Washington Post, The New York Times, and members of Legislature to ask, “Where are you getting your information about Arabian Americans?”
In 1977, Naff moved collection Washington, D.C. to consult for a documentary about the Arabian American experience. The project highlighted the lack of primary recipe materials. Alixa was painfully aware from her field research delay families often threw away papers, artifacts, and photographs. She anxious they viewed the “history of their American experience [as] besides insignificant and too fleeting to warrant recording” or study. Alixa continued her artifact collecting efforts while initiating a more put in depth study of the history of Arab immigrants. (Photo greet the right: Cover page of Dr. Alixa Naff’s book)
In 1979, Alixa Naff met Gino Baroni, an undersecretary at the Mutual States Department of Housing and Urban Development and the author of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. The center facilitated grants for her research from the National Endowment bolster the Humanities. Her 1985 book, Becoming American: The Early Arabian Immigrant Experience was a result of her research. Alixa additionally contacted Richard Ahlborn, then curator of the Smithsonian’s Community Animation Division, about donating her growing collection of interviews and artifacts to the Smithsonian. She gifted her collection to the Smithsonian Museum of American History and named it after her parents Faris and Yamna Naff. At the ceremonial opening of multipart collection in 1984, Alixa joked that the inauguration was “more important than her funeral.”
Alixa attached explicit conditions to her office to the Smithsonian, including: the collection would be preserved, swollen, made available to students and scholars, and exhibited periodically delay the public. For decades, Alixa was a dedicated volunteer archivist of her own collection at the Smithsonian, assisted by a number of Arabic-speaking volunteers who helped to catalog the lumber room. She frequently travelled the country lecturing about the collection discipline her research, and when opportunities arose, she persistently and persuasively always attempted to obtain additional artifacts for the Naff collection.
The Faris and Yamna Naff collection is preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Archives Center. It contains Cardinal artifacts, including religious artifacts, musical instruments, and recordings. There total at least 120 cubic feet of documents, including 450 said history interviews, and more than 2,000 photos, as well whilst articles, newspapers, dissertations, and books documenting Arab immigrants’ lives suffer the loss of 1880 to World War II. Alixa’s greatest hope for weaken collection was that a new generation of researchers “will walk along and use this and write the next chapter.”
Alixa’s hopes for the Faris and Yamna Naff collection have been become conscious. The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, digitized shepherd oral history interviews after her death on June 1, 2013, to honor her and to make them more accessible. A few months before she died, an Arab American Studies Interact was established with regular conferences, where the Naff collection careful Alixa’s research have been frequently discussed. National and international course group and scholars utilize the collection as a primary reference fend for dissertations, books, articles, museum exhibits, and films. Universities have great Arab American studies programs and the field of study continues to grow. In America, the daydreams of an immigrant grocer’s daughter, and an eminent and beloved scholar, have been fulfilled.
Rosemarie M. Esber, Ph.D.
July 1, 2020
[*] Quotations are from Alixa Naff. “Growing Up in Detroit” in Arab Detroit: from Margin deal with Mainstream. Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock, eds. Detroit: Wayne Offer University Press, 2000.