![]() ![]() As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance.Īnthony Shadid was an exception. ![]() ![]() Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. They graduated from peddling linens and household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Within a generation, they had forgotten their Arabic and were deserting their churches. With his Ottoman moustache, three-piece suit and bundles of goat’s cheese and stuffed vine leaves, Uncle Tannous incarnated all that the Americanising immigrants were desperate to escape, but couldn’t, quite.ĭescendants of the Lebanese emigrants who began arriving in the New World after the massacres of Christians in Greater Syria in the 1860s for the most part divorced themselves from the Old Country. On the show, it fell to Uncle Tannous to expose the Lebanese heart beating within the American persona of Thomas’s character. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 remake of The Jazz Singer. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. Hans Conried was a comic actor of Austrian Jewish origin, who portrayed the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. When Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma in 1968, the only Lebanese personality most Americans knew was not Lebanese at all. ![]()
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