When Dick and Shirlie Joseph arrive at the gleaming new granite-and-glass Beirut Airport late one July evening, three of Dick's second cousins and two of their sons are waiting for them, nervous and grinning. As the tall American walks towards them, the Lebanese men open their arms wide and hug him.
Dick and Shirlie have been travelling more than 24 hours, but they linger in their hotel lobby for an hour, smiling and nodding, feeling their way through 86 years of family absence. "My father was a graceful dancer," Dick Joseph tells Adib, Sleiman, Fares, Ghazi and Bassem. "At Syrian weddings he used to come out waving a handkerchief over his head and dance the dabke."
The Youssef men wear heavy gold jewellery, a Middle East custom. "Are they praying when they finger their worry beads?" Shirlie asks me. No, I tell her, it's just a nervous habit.
The empathy is strongest with blue-eyed Sleiman and his gentle son Ghazi.
Fares, the owner of a stationery shop, chain-smokes - to the annoyance of the health-conscious Americans. He has the long fingernails of Arab men who want to show they no longer work the land. And he is suspicious, drilling Dick on the names of his father's parents, incredulous that he doesn't know them. For in the Arab world, every name is a genealogy of several generations.
"Because my mother wasn't Syrian," Dick tries to explain, "we never spoke Arabic."
Lebanon, like Ireland, is a country of emigration. Over centuries its people have fled religious conflict and oppression, war and famine. Half-way round the world in the US, Dick Joseph's father - who died in 1971 - would talk for hours to his son about a land of Arabian horses, mountain streams, figs and pomegranate trees. The boy was born in Iowa, grew up in Wisconsin, studied business in Michigan, worked in insurance and retired in Oregon. But 86 years after his father fled his homeland, Dick Joseph's roots have pulled him back.
His father Ibrahim Youssef was smuggled out of Beirut in 1912, disguised as a girl. All contact with his family was broken off.
Lebanon did not exist then; it was part of the Ottoman province of Greater Syria, and its inhabitants were called Syrians. Ottoman troops scoured Ibrahim's home village of Mari-Hasbaya looking for conscripts. The boys crept from one house to another, one step ahead of the occupying army. To save their sons, families such as Ibrahim's dressed them as females, took them to Beirut port and put them on ships to France. Most sailed on to the US.
Until this month, much of what 71 year-old Dick Joseph knew about his father came from the Mormon church's family history data-bank - the Mormons collect the information so they can posthumously convert the dead (without permission, of course), but they also make it available to non-members. Dick learned that his father was born in what is now the Lebanese district of Hasbaya on February 22nd, 1895. He missed sailing on the Titanic - on which 125 Syrian-Lebanese emigrants perished - by eight months. Ibrahim Youssef boarded the French ship Niagara on December 18th, 1912, and arrived at Ellis Island 10 days later.
Ibrahim was only 17 years old when he headed for a country whose language he would never learn to read or write. The Niagara's passenger list called him Abraham Joseph - the English equivalent of Ibrahim Youssef. In 1922, he married Beulah Mae Lowe, a farm girl from Missouri who served food to railway workers in an Iowa canteen. Dick Joseph was born four years later. In 1927, Abraham Joseph's petition for US citizenship was granted, along with his request to change his name to Kenneth Joseph.
On his first visit to the Middle East in 1996, Dick Joseph pleaded with US embassy officials in the Syrian capital, Damascus to allow him to travel to his father's home village. The Lebanese civil war had been over for five and a half years and all Western hostages were long free, but Washington still banned its citizens from travelling to Lebanon. A Syrian general offered to smuggle him into Lebanon for $1,000 in cash, but the scheme fell through. That's when he wrote to me, after reading an article I had written from Lebanon.
"This is certainly an imposition on your time, I know, but you can understand the importance of this to me," he wrote. "Both my sisters are dead. My only living relatives, if any, on my father's side of the family are somewhere, either in the Middle East or have emigrated elsewhere."
A friend of mine, Major Maher Halabi of the Lebanese gendarmerie, is a Druze from Hasbaya. I asked for his help and wrote back to Dick, asking whether his father was a Druze or a Christian. The Druze are an off-shoot of Islam who believe in five holy colours and reincarnation. In the US, Kenneth Joseph had joined the Baptists, who gave him an Arabic Bible.
Along with his second letter, Dick enclosed old monochrome photos of his father; from Kenneth's face, Major Halabi guessed he must have been a Druze.
Our research was made all the more difficult because Hasbaya lies in the southeast corner of Lebanon, wedged between Syria and Israel, in an area occupied by Israel for the past 20 years. Residents of the occupied zone can travel only with special permits from both the Lebanese army and the SLA, the militia which is armed, trained and paid by Israeli occupation forces.
Major Halabi contacted the police chief of Hasbaya - Sleiman Youssef. (Like the Irish in New York or Corsicans in Paris, Druze dominate the Lebanese police force.) Sleiman knew that his grandfather's brothers emigrated to the US early in the century, but he did not know their names. Then, late last year, Dick received a letter from Lieut Adib Youssef, a security officer at Beirut Airport and the brother of the Hasbaya police chief Sleiman.
"My grandfather Sleiman had a brother," the letter said in faltering English. "Once both my grandfather and his brother travelled beyond the seas. After many years my grandfather came back . . . I discovered that your father is the brother of my grandfather. I cannot describe our happiness to know that there is someone (who) still remembers his father's family and wants to know his village."
Adib begged his American second cousin to visit the family. At the same time, Dick learned that the US government had lifted the ban on travel to Lebanon. "I feel as if a whole new world has opened up to me," he wrote back to Adib.
The US government did not make his family reunion easy. American airlines are still forbidden to sell tickets to Beirut, and when Dick finally learned he could buy a ticket through British Airways in Los Angeles, the jacket contained a State Department warning of the "dangers" of travel to Lebanon.
"Americans have in the past been targets of numerous terrorist attacks . . . The perpetrators of these attacks are still present in Lebanon, and retain the ability to act . . . Americans working at the US embassy do not normally use Beirut International Airport due to the concern about security of passengers and aircraft."
During his first days in Lebanon, Dick's memories of his father resurface. He feels American - not Arab. Back in Wisconsin there were sometimes gang fights between whites and Arabs; it still hurts Dick when he remembers the customer who said at his first job in a dry cleaners, "I've heard of him - he's the new Syrian boy in town." Later, in US military service, Dick overheard a friend complaining that his sister had married "a goddam black Syrian" and the pain stung him again. "I kept thinking, `I'm not an immigrant. I was born here'." Yet when he tried to join a Syrian club at his father's suggestion, a young Arab man stood up and said, "We can't have any half-breeds."
For his father Kenneth Joseph, the US was not the land of plenty. During the Depression, the family rented two rooms above a bar, and Dick's mother dumped dishwater on the drunks outside.
Because Kenneth was illiterate in English, it was easy for his US business partner to cheat him. Kenneth's Arab sense of honour made him work two jobs to pay back the debts. During a fire in his dry cleaning shop, he was badly burned when he tried to save customers' clothes. His wife Beulah - Dick's mother - was converted by the Jehovah's Witnesses and made life a misery for her husband and children. "She destroyed my father's Arabic Bible," Dick says. "To her it was something foreign."
On Dick and Shirlie Josephs' fourth day in Lebanon, they set out for Hasbaya, reaching the Lebanese army check-point at Kfar-Falous in the early morning. They have to hitch a ride to the SLA militia check-point five miles away, then go to an office in Jezzine for another permit to pass an Israeli encampment. The middle-class Oregon couple are stunned to see teenage Lebanese boys, some as young as 14, walking around with assault rifles. Just as Dick's father was forced to leave home to escape conscription in a foreign army, so his cousins' sons travel to Beirut to avoid serving in the SLA.
The couple arrive in the foothills of Mount Hermon, in a fertile countryside of olive groves and terraced farmland. In Mari-Hasbaya, a village of 1,000 souls, 15 people are waiting outside the home of Sleiman Youssef. As Dick and Shirlie drive up, more pour into the street, at least 35 of them. "Is it true you've got the American with you?" one of them asks the driver.
"Yes, and he's got a big bag full of money. You better be careful because he's come to claim his inheritance!" the driver chides them. "I knew it! I knew it!" says the distant cousin.
There is laughter and hugs, tea and cakes before the Josephs are driven two blocks in Sleiman's Mercedes to the home of Youssef Youssef. The patriarch of the clan, Youssef and his sister Hassiba are Dick Joseph's only surviving first cousins. Youssef is a farmer and two years younger than Dick, but he looks much older. As he walks towards Dick wearing a white tarbouche hat and black Arab robes, the American cousin starts crying. When Dick brings out the photographs of his father, everyone marvels at the strong resemblance between Ibrahim Youssef's profile and that of his nephew Youssef.
Hassiba, an elderly woman who wears a white scarf covering her head and half of her face - the custom among religious Druze women - is the family's living memory. "Your father was the tallest and the youngest of the brothers," she tells Dick. Does she have any idea, he asks, which brother was his uncle George - the man who learned to read and write English and ran a successful car dealership until the Depression? "That was Mahmoud," Hassiba answers. "He was the brightest. We were always told that Mahmoud was the brightest of the boys who went to America."
The family has bought a lamb to slaughter on the doorstep of the house, the tradition for an honoured guest, but Dick and Shirlie plead for the animal's life and it is freed to roam the hills of Hasbaya. While Druze women sit on the kitchen floor preparing a feast of kibbeh with pine-nuts, betanjan and tabbouleh - all dishes his father used to make in the US - Dick shows snapshots of his children and grandchildren to his cousins. Not once do the Youssefs speak of the 1976-1990 civil war or the Israeli occupation. They want to hear about Dick's life, about their family in the US. When Dick explains to Youssef that his first wife died, tears come to the old man's eyes. "That is something else we have in common - my first wife died too."
A family tree drawn up by eager relatives shows that Dick - the man who feared he had no living relatives on his father's side - has two first cousins, 20 second cousins and 54 third cousins in Beirut and Mari-Hasbaya. The babies crawling under the table at the family feast are fourth and fifth cousins. In his Arab robes, old Youssef barbecues meat on a spit in the garden. After three joyous, chaotic hours, Dick and Shirlie must head back for the militia and army check-points before they close at nightfall.
"We have a couple of spare bedrooms in our house in Oregon," Dick says, his voice cracking with emotion. "Any of you can come and stay with us."
Sleiman and Youssef insist on riding as far as possible with Dick and Shirlie. Other cousins follow behind them. When the time comes to part, old Youssef holds his tall cousin in his arms and won't release him. "Now that you've come back, you must stay here," he says. Both men are weeping.
A few months ago, Dick Joseph learned of a memorial under construction at Ellis Island - where his father landed in 1912 - in homage to the emigrants who built America. He sent in his cheque for $100, and asked that his father's name and country of origin read: Ibrahim Kenneth Joseph Youssef, Greater Syria, Ottoman Empire - "so that anyone from either country will recognise him".