Tweet My dad was a small petite man, with an enormous nose and sharp piercing small eyes; he wasn’t a heavy-handed, intimidating father figure. However, he believed that to survive raising a large family of 10 on $7 monthly salary, you needed to be vigilant in reconstructing our family values.First, to put our house in order, he gave us character-based nicknames; our original Arabic names had been either those of a prophet or a servant of God, Muhammed, Ahmed, Abdelraffe, Aabdellnasser, Abdelaal, etc… didn’t reflect who we really are, so I became the Sursarah, the small cockroach; my mom was Walad, one of the boys; the skinny one was Feseekhah,…
