Margaret Litvin

Palestinian writer Najati Sidqi (1905-1979) has been praised and criticized from many directions: a gifted political journalist, he was also a very early Arab member of the Palestinian Communist Party, an outspoken antifascist, and a translator of Russian literature. He wrote an interesting political memoir, which I’ve recently translated with two BU undergraduates (Gideon Gordon and Anas bin Alfadino, CAS ’24). But the memoir is oddly impersonal and has strange gaps. The literary nonfiction book I propose to write fills in what Sidqi left out: the inspiring and heartbreaking story of Najati’s once-communist Polish-born Jewish wife Lotka Lorberbaum Sidqi (1905-1979) and their daughter Dawlieh Saadi (1930-2018), taken to the USSR as an infant and raised in Soviet orphanages speaking only Russian. Drawing on archives and family interviews from Russia, Lebanon, France, Spain, Israel, Greece, and Brazil, I have nearly completed the research for a collective biography of the Sidqi family. I even had the honor of translating Najati and Lotka’s letters to Dawlieh for the younger Sidqi children (born 1941 and 1946), who know no Russian.