Valley News · Van Nuys, California · 13 December 1964

CP-1964-001

Palestinian Artists Depict Tragedy of Great Exodus

Worth a Thousand Words

Transcribed from the clipping

“Two Palestinian artists, the husband and wife team of Ismail and Tamam Shammout, today are looking back to the experience of their recent exhibition, warmed by the reception of Valley viewers and still carrying the memory of faces, both old and young, as they first looked upon the canvases. The exhibit, called the Arab Art Show and held at UCLA International Center, depicted the story, through pigment and brush, of the artists’ own personal tragedy, lived with almost a million other Palestinians… A native of Lydda, Ismail was only 17 when he trekked out of his home town in 1948 with his family and 80,000 other refugees. A frail, 3-year-old brother died of thirst and exhaustion on the 24-hour exodus under a searing sun to the nearest Arab town. Here, for the first few years of refugee life, Ismail earned an existence selling bread and fruits. It was not until four years later that he could even afford paper and pencil. After teaching for a short time at a Quaker refugee school in Gaza, where the classroom was a tent and the students sat on the floor, Ismail went to Cairo where he finally managed to join the School of Fine Arts. Here the boy worked daily until midnight to earn his scant living. But with all the hardships and privations, there was one consolation: There was Tamam. Tamam was another Palestinian refugee with an almost identical background, from Jaffa. She and Ismail were bound closer together when they discovered that each sought the same goal — to put on canvas, the plight of their countrymen… Both now have built themselves a name of international honor, with their lives still devoted to the original goal of recording for all time, in the blood-reds, the deep blacks, the grays and the earth-browns of their palettes, the tragedy of Palestine.”

Context added by this archive

The archive had nothing from 1964 before this. A suburban California paper, nineteen years before the word Nakba reaches American print, describing the expulsion from Lydda, eighty thousand people on the road and a three-year-old dead of thirst on the way — in the arts pages, under a standing head that reads Worth a Thousand Words. The dead child is the only person in the story who is not named.

Cite this item

"Palestinian Artists Depict Tragedy of Great Exodus," Valley News, 13 December 1964. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1964-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1964-001