When my grandfather came to the United States from Syria in the early twentieth century, he brought with him the mores and values of a Middle Eastern Jewish culture that has not been protected and secured for his descendants. The literary texts as well as the documentary history of his world have been almost completely forgotten amidst a sea of adaptation to a very different way of seeing things. My grandfather was heir to many traditions that were to him a very intimate and organic part of the world in which he grew up: a world that was increasingly collapsing and falling prey to new modes of identification.