Nick Abou-Assaly: Transcript

Lebanese immigration traditions, Cedar Rapids
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By the 1940s there were over 100 grocery stores owned by Lebanese families in Cedar Rapids. I’m Nick AbouAssaly, and I live in Marion.

The Lebanese community in Cedar Rapids or in the Cedar Rapids area has been here since the late 1800s. In the late 1800s, people started leaving Lebanon to escape the Ottoman oppression and to look for a better life economically. Most of Lebanon at that time was agricultural communities, little villages. And people started leaving really in large numbers.

By the turn of the century, of the 20th century, there were 90,000 Lebanese immigrants in the Northeast, in the area of New York and Boston. And then they started going west. Almost all of them were peddlers. That was the main occupation. They would be basically handed a suitcase by a friend or relative, and they’d go off walking the roads. And they were a distribution system for the farm communities.

And they traveled all across America selling things out of their suitcases. And they ended up here in Cedar Rapids. One man basically built a store with some rooms in the back and started supplying the peddlers as they came through, and housing them overnight. And pretty soon, as most of those original immigrants wanted to get married and have families, they started to settle down. And so a community started forming here in Cedar Rapids and across the Midwest—you know, in lots of towns across the Midwest, including many in Iowa, such as Fort Dodge and Sioux City.

The immigrant families then started gathering here from smaller farming communities where they had settled and opened stores. And that’s how the community grew here in Cedar Rapids.

Most of the people in Cedar Rapids came from the same area of Lebanon, a small cluster of villages. And so they tend to be of the same religion, which is Orthodox Christian. And later, they brought their Muslim friends, helped them to come over. And so that’s how we ended up with the Muslim Lebanese community in Cedar Rapids. But the majority of the people and their descendants are Orthodox Christian.

You find that different—other communities formed in other parts of the state. The Catholics went to Des Moines and Omaha. And so people followed their family and friends. And that’s how you get people of the same religion sort of concentrated in one area.

Emigration has always been a part of life in Lebanon because the people tend to be highly educated. And the economy’s underdeveloped and not able to really hold all the people. And so there’s always been a trickle of emigration from that early emigration period of the late 1800s up until the 1970s. People kept bringing their family over, or people would go back and get married and bring them over.

But the civil war of the mid-seventies really escalated—accelerated the emigration. And so a large group of people came to the United States, and especially Cedar Rapids.

My family came here during the civil war in Lebanon, at the start of the civil war. My parents wanted us to be able to go to school and not have that be interrupted and wanted us to have a better life at that time. We ended up here because my mom had her brother and sister who had immigrated before her. They had come here because my mother’s uncles had immigrated here after World War I. And so, you know, they naturally came where we knew people. And my father’s family was mostly around the Toledo, Ohio, area. And so they chose to stay in Cedar Rapids because they liked that better.