The family from left to right: Jamiel, father Sam Jabara, Kallid, Essie, Nayfe, Mother Mymonie Jabara and Selma.

 

Jabara's father, Sam, migrated from his village in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range to Northern Michigan, where he worked in a tannery. After an accident left him unable to work at the tannery anymore, Sam began to maintain a boarding house for workers from his Lebanese village, then became a partner and later the owner of a grocery business that served townfolk and the nearby lumber camp. Selling the establishment to the town, he set off in search of a wife and soon learned about Mymonie, Jabara's mother, and married her in Duluth, Minnesota in 1923. (She passed away earlier this year at the age of 90).

The couple settled in North Michigan, where they were quickly integrated into the town. In fact Sam became the town's outstanding citizen -- when he was killed in an auto accident in 1951, the town congregated in the largest funeral ever.

Father Sam Jabara in his grocery, 1940.

"I was very close to my father," says Jabara. "He had a very strong sense of ethnic identity of which he was proud and he was not afraid to tell people. In the store, he spoke Arabic to my older brothers and sisters, even if it sometimes embarrassed them."