We welcome  submissions of short  articles, essays, stories, news  items  and  photos for  publication in the  Levantine newsletter.  Please send  your queries  to the editor.

Win a Pair of Tickets to See Jane Birkin's "Arabesque" With Djam & Fam on Nov. 18 at UCLA's Royce Hall...

OR Win a Pair of Tickets to See the Syrian Whirling Dervishes of Damuscus on Nov. 20 at Royce Hall...ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CALL.

Upon reading this, call us during office hours, 9 am-5 pm, with your name, phone number and email address: 310.559.5544. Winners will be contacted by phone or email.

Nov. 18 (Thurs.), 8:00 pm—"Arabesque" with Jane Birkin and Djam & Fam of Algeria

With her gamine good looks, beguiling demeanor and sweet voice, this radiant mini-skirted girl from Chelsea took London by storm in the ‘60s and ‘70s, both as an actress in films such as the acclaimed "Blow-Up," and as the protégé to her late ex-husband, legendary French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. Together they recorded several albums, including the infamously sexy British chart-topper, “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus,” banned by the BBC in 1969 for Birkin’s erotically explicit sighs. An unlikely hero in France, Gainsbourg has recently been embraced by a new generation of rock hipsters, from Beck to Air, seduced by his stylish songs of love and carnal longing. In a tribute to Gainsbourg, Birkin and the outstanding Group Djam & Fam of Algeria reinvent his songs in the dazzling context of North African folk music, mixing Moroccan rhythms, soulful Middle Eastern harmonies, shades of Andalusia, and breathy vocals oozing with elegant sensuality.Each of these songs is introduced by a long instrumental in the style of Oum Khalsoum, with the oud playing of Amel Riahi el Mansouri, percussion by Aziz Boularoug, piano by Fred Maggi and strings by Djamel Benyelles, the group's leader and Rai's most famous string player. He can be heard with Cheb Khaled, Cheb Mami and other Algerian music stars as well such French acts as Jacques Higelin. After traveling "Arabesque" to places as far afield as Toyko and Carthage, Algeria, Birkin plays her first concert in Los Angeles in years.

UCLA's Royce Hall. Tix $45, $35, $25 and $15 for students. Go here for tickets online, or call the UCLA Central Ticket Office (CTO) at 310.825.2101, Mon-Fri from 10am-4pm; and Sat & Sun from 10am-2pm.

Go here for musical samples, and here.

The Whirling Dervishes   Nov. 20 (Sat.), 8 pm—The Whirling Dervishes of Damascus, Sheikh Hamza Shakkûr & the Al-Kindi Ensemble at UCLA's Royce Hall "Sheikh Hamza Shakkûr has a deep, magnificently rounded voice, whose sublime tones could do for Islamic liturgical music what Hildegard von Bingen did for Gregorian chants." — Daily Telegraph Believing that music has the ability to lift the spirit to realms above, the Muslim mystical sect known as the Sufis have performed their trance-like whirling in reverence to the divine power for thousands of years. In Sufism, the sacred ritual known as Sama (literally meaning listening) denotes the tradition of listening in a spiritual fashion to music and chanting, in which the energy of God, or Allah, is said to travel through the body and into the world as a result of divine love and meditation. Classical Arab music meets sacred chant as some of Syria's most revered practitioners of the Sama come together to showcase the distinct traditions from the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. Founded by Arab zither virtuoso Julien Jâlal Eddine Weiss, the renowned Al-Kindî Ensemble, the venerated Sheikh Hamza Shakkûr and The Whirling Dervishes of Damascus create an ethereal bridge across time and space in a profound and spellbinding drama of faith. Tickets $45, $35, $25 and $15 for UCLA students. Go here for tickets online, or call the UCLA Central Ticket Office (CTO) at 310.825.2101, Mon-Fri from 10am-4pm; and Sat & Sun from 10am-2pm.

:: LEVANTINE ARABIC SPEAKERS WANTED for LANGNET ::

If you speak Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese or Syrian Arabic, check out the announcement in our recent newsletter!

Calendar for November 2004
Stop by our current calendar, to see what's happening around town. Highlights:

• Nov. 13 Farzad Nikzad Art Opening & Reception
• Nov. 14 Israeli Human Rights Attorney Yael Berda
• Nov. 18 Jane Birkin's "Arabesque" with Djam & Fam from Algeria
• Nov. 20 Syria's Whirling Dervishes
• Nov. 20 "This Land to Me, Some Call Palestine, Others Israel" Photo Exhibit & Reception

Did you know? Levantine Cultural Center has: • Presented and co-presented over 50 cultural events; • Established a working relationship with a significant number of major and lesser-known cultural organizations in Los Angeles that include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, Amnesty Intl. Film Festival, Cal Arts/Red Cat Film Festival, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and others; • Served an average of 20,000 people annually; • Received an abundance of favorable reviews for its cultural events in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere; • Developed a solid membership base of 1,500; • Developed a dynamic website — www.levantinecenter.org — with over 1,000,000 hits, reaching thousands of people beyond the local cultural scene.

 Have you recently enjoyed a new  book,  movie or concert, attended a  cultural  event or discovered  a new  restaurant  or shop? Share your  thoughts with our  friends in  the  Levantine Café...

NOVEL NEWS: Peter Theroux Translates Emile Hababy's last novel, the recommended Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter. Order from Ibis Editions

One moonless night in the summer of 1983, on a boulder off the shore of what once was Al-Zeeb, a Palestinian village north of Acre, the narrator of Emile Habiby’s haunting last novel catches a glimpse of a mysterious female figure in the sea. “The episode,” he says, “was a kind of key, like the ancient Egyptian key of life … or a magic instrument, like Aladdin’s lamp. I took it up as I began to excavate the mountains of oblivion, trying, as best I could, to penetrate the caverns of memory.” In the remarkable tale that follows, Habiby’s alter-ego—novelist, politician, devoted fisherman—struggles to discover just who or what this apparition was. Saraya, as she is known, is a character in a Palestinian legend about a young girl captured and imprisoned by an ogre. But in Habiby’s subtle, dark, and often wryly comic telling, she takes on a fluid host of roles, sometimes shifting in the course of a single page from the flesh-and-blood beloved of the hero’s childhood to a whispery symbol of the wadis and ridges around Mount Carmel to a kind of laughing muse. “Who is Saraya and who is the ogre?” he asks himself, early on. The book—equal parts allegory, folk tale, memoir, political commentary, and ode to a ruined landscape—works as an extended attempt to discover the girl’s true identity and, in doing so, to reconcile the writer (and his fictional counterpart) with the painful past of his land and his people.

Weaving the voices of several narrators—as well as meditations (by turns serious and ironic) on sources as disparate as Maxim Gorky and al-Mutanabbi, Plato and Amenhotep—Habiby’s late masterpiece is a work of tremendous power and originality. Rendered for the first time ever in English by the accomplished translator and writer Peter Theroux, Saraya is essential reading for anyone interested in the imaginative life of the Middle East.

“In Arabic, Habiby had no precursors and has had no successors.… Acknowledging his debt to Voltaire and Swift, he has proven inimitable.”
Middle East Magazine