Real Lives
Bookseller Mohammed Saad dug thirty-five years of books out of Gaza's rubble
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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The war took Mohammed Saad's home in Beit Lahia, the bookstore that had defined his life, and a son. What it could not take, he went back for.
The 58-year-old bookseller had spent thirty-five years building his collection when the destruction of northern Gaza buried it under the debris. Displaced south to Deir al-Balah, Saad did what almost nobody does: he returned to the ruins to dig the books out, the Associated Press reported in July.
The shooting was right above our heads, and I was grabbing books because books are precious. I've been dealing with these books for 35 years.
Mohammed Saad, to the Associated Press
A bookshop with no walls#
What he carried back now stands stacked on a roadside in Deir al-Balah — a tent bookshop with no shelves and no storage, the rescued volumes open to the heat and the dust. It earns his family a living, and it gives readers in a city of tents something no aid truck delivers.
Customers come. Students hunting textbooks that no longer exist in print in Gaza, parents after children's stories, readers who lost their own libraries under their own homes. Al Jazeera filmed the stall in July and called it what it has become: a roadside library built from books buried in rubble.
Don't burn them#
Saad's larger campaign is against the fate threatening every book in Gaza, where paper has become cooking fuel. He buys books to save them.
Whoever has books, don't burn them. I'll buy them from anyone who has books — because books have value, and books are life for a person.
Mohammed Saad's appeal to Gaza's readers
A man who lost his son speaks of books as life, and there is no contradiction in it: the shop is how he keeps his family fed and his city reading at the same time.
Thirty-five years of bookselling did not end under the rubble of Beit Lahia. It moved to a tent in Deir al-Balah, and it is open.
