She left al-Mawṣil with the clothes on her body. She kept everything that mattered — the poem, the dialect, the love her parents taught her in Markab.

Meira Yona has died, in Haifa, in her ninety-sixth year. I called her Sitt al-Kull — ست الكل — the noble lady of Mosul. The name fit, and it was the only name fit for her. Of the many hundreds of people I have come to know across this work and across this life, she was the only one I ever met who seemed to me incapable of hatred. She knew what hatred was. She had been searched and stripped at a checkpoint by men who would not call her a citizen. She had watched her husband dismissed from his post for being a Jew. She had walked out of the city of her birth with the clothes on her body and a poem in her head. But her parents — the merchant Salīm and his wife Saʿda, in the mukhtār‘s house in Markab — had taught her, in childhood, what to do with people instead. ʿAllamūnā an naḥtarim al-nās, nuqaddir al-nās, nusāʿid al-nās, she told me in 2022, in the matter-of-fact tone of someone reciting an arithmetic table: they taught us to respect people, to value people, to help people. She had spent her ninety-five years doing exactly that, line by line, every day, in three countries, in four languages. The instruction was the spine of her life. The love was its flowering.

Her love had names. She loved her granddaughter, who had telephoned her in the night before our recording to say that she had gone into labour. The boy was born before morning. By the time we sat for the camera Meira was already patiently instructing the new mother in the eighth-day naming custom — mamnūʿ, forbidden, until the brit milah, she insisted gently, the child cannot be named — and she said it the way her own mother had said it to her seventy years earlier. She loved that great-grandson, named eight days later by the very rule she was transmitting that morning. She loved her daughter, who has been with her in Haifa for all the years between. She loved Mosul — al-Mawṣil — with a love that was not nostalgia, because nostalgia is for what is over, and for her al-Mawṣil was never over; it was a place that continued, somewhere, in her mouth and in her hands and in the rhythm of her sentences. She loved its dialect. She thought in the qeltu Arabic of the river city after seventy years in a Hebrew-speaking country — alone, among everyone we have interviewed in this project. Hebrew was her competence; Mosuli Arabic was her self. She loved its food, its songs, the smell of its wildflowers in spring, the names of streets she had not walked in three-quarters of a century. She loved her classmates of seventy-five years earlier — Suʿād, the Shanshal sisters Fāʾiqa and Ramziyya, the Syriac-Christian Anjīl Suryān, the Armenian Kandariyān — and she kept their names in her mouth the way one keeps the names of sisters. She loved strangers who came to her door for an interview. She had baked bourekas that morning, and she set them down on a plate, and she would not begin the recording until the team had eaten.

And she loved me. The telephone would ring on a Saturday morning, more often than not, and it would be Meira Yona. She called every week from Haifa to wherever I was — Paris, sometimes farther. Always she called me; never the other way. Our conversations went on for hours. Sometimes she had a question for the project: a word in the Mosuli dialect she wanted us to track down together, the precise location of a courtyard inside Markab, the name of a teacher half lost to her. Sometimes she had news from her life: a granddaughter going into labour, a great-grandson named, a small quarrel in the building. Sometimes she had a story for the archive, returning to one she had told me before, finding a new corner of it she had not yet given me. Sometimes she only wanted to listen — to news of Haifa, of al-Mawṣil, of whatever I had been doing — with the patience of someone for whom no detail was too small. She closed every call with a blessing. Always a blessing. The line would go quiet, and a week would pass, and the telephone would ring again. It will not ring this Saturday. I do not yet know how to carry the silence.

On 21 June 2022, in a sunlit room in Haifa, in her ninety-second year, she sat for the recording that became the foundation document of our project. She announced, early on, with a small wink for the camera, that she was always the most elegant woman in the building — anā dāʾiman elegante, awwal........

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