Translator’s Preface
by William Tamplin
Cry in a Long Night was a strange book to translate into English. Not least of all because Cry in a Long Night was originally written in English. The author, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-1994), claimed to have written this novel in English in Jerusalem in the summer of 1946. Jerusalem then was an apocalyptic city fraught with random explosions and terrorist violence as the British Mandate over Palestine slowly expired and the two local communities, Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Arab, which had crystallized during the Mandate years, prepared for war. In January 1948, in the midst of civil war, Jabra fled to Baghdad, taking his English novel with him.
Jabra originally entitled the work Passage in the Silent Night, and it was in fact his second English
