House of Stone

House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East is a 2012 book by American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid. It narrates Shadid’s “quixotic project” to rebuild the family home his Lebanese family abandoned when they emigrated to the United States. Alongside this personal story, Shadid relates his family’s history in Ottoman-era Lebanon and in America, as well as portraying the contemporary decline of his family’s hometown, Marjayoun. House of Stone was published posthumously after Shadid was killed while reporting on the conflict in Syria for The New York Times. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012.

Shadid begins his story in 2006: he is in Lebanon, covering the eighteen-day war for The Washington Post. He is exhausted. It is his fifteenth year as a war correspondent, and five years earlier, he was shot by an Israeli sniper. His marriage is falling apart, in part, due to the pressures of his dangerous career.

From Beirut, he travels to Marjayoun, the largely Christian Lebanese town from which both sides of his family, the Shadids and the Samaras, had emigrated to Oklahoma early in the twentieth century. Now perched on the Israeli border, the formerly prosperous Ottoman town has endured a century of warfare and appears to be in terminal decline. Shadid locates the impressive stone house built by his wealthy great-grandfather, Isber Samara.



A few months later, Shadid visits Marjayoun again, to find that the upper story of Isber Samara’s house has been half-destroyed by an Israeli rocket. Picturing his grandmother as a little girl, picking olives from the trees around the house, he feels compelled to buy an olive tree and plant it there, to show that the house, “whatever its condition, remained a home worth care.”

A year later, in 2007, Shadid takes a leave of absence from the Post and goes to live in Marjayoun. Lebanon is on the verge of civil war, and local acquaintances advise him against it, but Shadid is determined to rebuild the family home. He hopes that one day, he will be able to bring his daughter, Laila, here, to show her that her heritage is real and living: “She often asked me [over the phone] what I was doing so far away. 'Rebuilding our home,’ I told her, but understandably, given her age, she failed to appreciate that this absence was, oddly enough, my attempt to make amends for all the others.”

The project quickly runs into difficulties. Shadid has to wrestle with the Lebanese approach to scheduling work, which is much more fluid than the American approach. Local merchants see him as an easy mark, while the townspeople assume that he is either crazy or a deeply embedded spy.



Meanwhile, Shadid gets to know his new neighbors. From Shibil, a middle-aged pot-smoker, he learns about the locals’ love-hate relationship with their town. Marjayoun is slowly dying, as people trickle away in search of economic opportunity and freedom from conflict. He meets a local councilor, Hikmat, who wants to return Marjayoun to its glory days.

Shadid becomes close with Dr. Khairalla, a former hospital administrator who felt betrayed by the townspeople when no one defended him against accusations of conspiring with the Israelis. Now, the good doctor is dying of cancer, but he spends his time hand-crafting musical instruments, and from him, Shadid learns to take a craftsman’s approach to his work. Shadid also encounters a distant cousin, Karim, who treats Shadid like a family-member (guilt trips included).

Interwoven with the story of Shadid’s stay in Marjayoun is the history of the house, and its builder Isber Samara. Isber was a successful merchant, who profited from the borderless world of the Ottoman Empire, where the cultures and ethnicities of the Middle East traded freely and tolerated their differences. Isber had just finished his magnificent house—the badge of his family’s new status—when World War I collapsed the Ottoman Empire. The British and French authorities carved up the territories of the Middle East as they saw fit, sowing the seeds of conflict everywhere. Realizing there was no future in Marjayoun, Isber sent his children to America. Shadid finishes his family’s story by tracing how his grandparents met in Oklahoma.



Since the end of the First World War, the population of Marjayoun has fallen from 3,752 to less than 800. This decline deeply saddens and angers those who are left, but when Shadid publishes an article describing the town as “dying,” his neighbors are furious with him.

Slowly the house-building project comes together. Shadid cleans out a cesspool with his own hands, manages to find skilled contractors, and more-or-less completes the house before his leave of absence ends. He manages to restore the interior according to his great-grandfather’s original plans. As he moves through the finished house, Shadid feels a deep experience of bayt, an Arabic word that means both “house” and “home.”