Summary
As a teenager in 1960s Beirut, a young aspiring journalist joined a leading French language newspaper and came under the guidance of two remarkable editors who shaped his literary development. They cultivated a space where cultural refinement, intellectual rigor, and freedom of expression defined success. Their mentorship helped form his identity as a writer and instilled a deep belief in culture as a bridge across divisions. Though his later life took him in an unexpected national direction, their influence remained central to his voice and worldview.
Key Takeaways
- A 16 year old aspiring writer found mentorship and belonging within a prominent Beirut newspaper, where two influential women recognized his talent and nurtured his voice.
- The literary section of the paper played a central role in shaping modern Lebanese cultural identity, blending Francophone influence with local intellectual life during a vibrant era.
- The relationship between mentor and student transcended religious and political divides, leaving a lasting impact even as history and geography eventually separated them.
I belong to a land that invents itself every day, a land that is like a poem written on the sand, the sea erases it, and the heart rewrites it.
I am writing so that silence will not be the last word, so that the ruins of Beirut will flourish again through the ink. My land is an open wound, but within this wound lies the most beautiful sun in the world.
— From Nadia’s poems
Until today, I do not know from where I had the courage to go to the daily French newspaper Le Jour with the intention to be part of the team. I was barely 16 years old. I went up the stairs of the Le Jour editorial board with the notebook pressed against my chest, almost like an amulet. Beirut of 1966 buzzed outside—the siren of cars, the smell of the sea and coffee—but inside, in the corridors of the system, another language prevailed: refined French, the noise of typewriters, and the smell of expensive European perfume mixed with cigarette smoke.
I found myself in the editorial room, which looked to me as a giant teeming beehive. I was struck by the number of women busy answering phones, dictating and machine typing. I felt lost and froze for a moment. Then, something happened.
A woman sitting behind a modest desk looked up and asked what I was doing. I didn’t hesitate. “I want to write,” I answered. She didn’t laugh. She saw in front of her a Jewish boy with passion in his eyes, and at that moment, inside the cultural laboratory she had set up, my religion was marginal compared to my ability to feel the word. She told me to hand her my notebook and come back a week later. When I returned the week after, she showed me an empty desk beside her and told me: “This is yours. You will sit near me and you will listen to what I have to say.”
This was my second encounter with Nadia Tuéni, the wife of Ghassan Tuéni, the owner of the leading Arabic newspaper Al-Nahar and its French version Le jour! Working under such a figure at the age of 16, and in the system of the mythical Le Jour, is a life lesson that you don’t get in any school. Nadia was not just a poet and writer; she was the embodiment of the modern, intellectual, and free Lebanese of Beirut’s “Golden Age.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanon was relatively liberal, but the sectarian barriers were (and still are) very rigid. The move by Nadia Hamada, a member of a prominent Druze family from the Shuf Mountains, to marry Ghassan Tuéni, the powerful man of the Lebanese press and an Orthodox Christian, was an act of courageous rebellion. Their relationship was not only romantic but a symbiosis of two spiritual giants. Together, they led the newspaper An-Nahar and Le Jour, and made them a center of freedom of expression and journalistic excellence. Nadia lived and wrote about the seam between East and West, between Arabic and French, and between the Druze faith and the general Lebanese space.
As the editor of the literary section, she didn’t just cover culture, she created it. Nadia was known for her ability to detect a spark in young people. She made the section the main stage for Francophone writers and poets in Lebanon. She combined aristocratic elegance with deep social sensitivity. For her, the press was a tool for education and the promotion of modernism.
Nadia is considered one of the most important poets who wrote in French in the Middle East. Her poems touched on themes of landscape, pain, and identity. Her most famous book, “Liban: Vingt visages sur un seul profile” (Lebanon: Twenty Faces in One Profile), is a painful love poem for her country, written against the backdrop of the civil war that tore her heart apart. Her other book of poems “L’age d’ecume”, which she dedicated with utmost affection to me, describing me as a “charming young poet and very effective work companion” was a literary success in France.
Her life was full of pain; she lost her daughter Nayla to cancer at a young age, and she herself succumbed to the disease in 1983 when she was only 47 years old. Nadia remained a symbol of Lebanon that could have been secular, multicultural, educated, and bold. It broke the “glass ceiling” of ethnicity and gender even before this concept existed.
Sitting behind another desk, close to the window that overlooked Beirut’s busy business center along the Hamra street, was Marie-Thérèse Arbid, who asked Nadia permission for her to task me on various missions. Marie-Therese was a pillar of the newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour (after the merger of the two newspapers in 1971) and originally of Le Jour. She was a journalist of a rare breed: sharp, highly educated, and with an extraordinary ability for social and cultural analysis.
Nadia and Marie-Therese were a winning team. While Nadia brought the poetic spirit and cultural vision, Marie-Therese was sometimes the more practical and critical voice, the one who knew how to polish texts and turn them into diamonds. She was known for her elegant French writing, which was the hallmark of Beirut’s intellectual elite. She didn’t just report on events; she analyzed the “soul” of Lebanese society. Her death in 1991 marked the end of an era. She lived through all the difficult years of the civil war in Beirut, struggling to keep a newspaper under fire, believing that the written word was civilization’s last fortress.
As a 16-year-old boy, I witnessed a fascinating dynamic: On the one hand, Nadia, the Druze who broke conventions and married an Orthodox, who brought with her an aura of aristocracy and almost mystical inspiration. On the other hand, Marie-Therese: the polished professional, who has been a mentor to generations of young journalists. Together, the two created an environment in which the quality of the writing was the only measure of success. In Lebanon at the time, the literary section was not just an “addition” to the newspaper; it was the beating heart of the political and social discourse.
Indeed, in the 1960s, the literary section was an ideological battleground. Nadia and Marie-Thérèse led a line that sought a unique Lebanese identity, one that combines the Mediterranean, Phoenicians, and French culture.
In contrast to the conservative Arab press, Nadia’s column was the pioneer of Francophony. You didn’t just write a “book review.” You wrote essays. Nadia pushed for a personal, almost visual style of writing. She demanded that I not only “report,” but “feel” the text. Marie-Thérèse was the one who went through my texts with a red pen, making sure that French was perfect and that there were no clichés. She was the “keeper of the language.” Even though I was still a student in my boarding school in Mount Lebanon, I obtained special permissions so I could split my time between school and sitting in the old office, surrounded by cigarette smoke (as befits the time) and the noise of typewriters, when Nadia enters in her European-Lebanese style and tells me: “Stop writing facts, write about what the book made you dream.”
There is no doubt that my gathering under Nadia’s wings was significant. She and Marie-Therese accepted me despite my Jewishness and adopted me as a family member. But more important, they were convinced that I would go to France to continue my studies and did not imagine that I would head to Israel.
There was a great intimacy with Nadia, who frequently invited me to their home in Beit Mery, where facing the spectacular mountain view, I ate Damascus ice cream for the first time. The Tuéni family’s home in Beit Mery was a pilgrimage center for intellectuals from all over the world. The Damascus ice cream (bouza) with its pistachios and stretchy texture is a distinct sensory memory of the old Near East, a moment of sweetness in a world of turbulent politics.
Interestingly, I never felt a condescending attitude on the part of the two women whom, today, I am convinced had fallen in love with a young man who came with notebooks to the editorial board and, when Nadia inquired about his actions, replied that he wants to write in the newspaper. The fact that Nadia and Marie-Thérèse adopted me as a “family member” despite the political tensions of the time, testifies to their true nobility and liberalism. For them, a 16-year-old boy walking into a system with notebooks and saying “I want to write” was the embodiment of the cultural hope they were trying to cultivate.
Their belief that I will continue to France (the natural path of the Francophone elite) as opposed to my choice of Israel, is a moment of painful and astonishing historical irony. In those moments at Beit Mery, I was all part of one cultural space, before borders and wars drew impassable lines.
If Nadia had known that I had chosen Israel, perhaps as a poet who believes in human pain and fate, she would have understood my search for identity, even if it was politically complex for her.
Nadia and Marie-Therese didn’t just teach me to write; they gave me the privilege of being a citizen of the world, a person who sees beauty and truth as the supreme value.
I wonder what they would have said had they known that the boy with the notebooks, the one almost adopted as a son in the editorial rooms of Le Jour, did not proceed to Paris as they had imagined. My path did not pass through the Sorbonne, but crossed the border that symbolized for you the edge of the familiar world.
Nadia, I still remember your look when you read my first drafts. You had a nobility that broke conventions, and maybe that’s why you didn’t shy away from my identity. In your home in Beit Mery, between a spoonful of Damascus ice cream and a conversation about poetry, you taught me that culture is the only bridge that doesn’t collapse.
Marie-Therese, I still feel your “red pen” on my heart every time I write a sentence. Your precision, your refusal to accept mediocrity, and the way you protected me in the system – all of these have become part of my compass here in Israel.
I chose a different path, a path that separated us physically, but inside me, I’m still your young journalist. I write in Hebrew, but sometimes I think in the French rhythm you taught me.
As of today, Nadia’s legacy has a succession. Nayla Tuéni, (the daughter of Gebran Tueni, assassinated in 2005, and Nadia’s niece (named after Nadia’s daughter) is a prominent Lebanese journalist, a former member of parliament from 2009 to 2018. She is a fourth-generation journalist and the current CEO and Editor-in-Chief of An-Nahar, one of Lebanon’s most influential newspapers.
Nadia, your Lebanon no longer exists, but in my old notebooks, Beirut will always remain the city where I became a writer, thanks to you.
