New York City

New York City is a formative setting in Khaled Ansari’s memories, joining his student research into ancient black markets with a love that became entangled, in his own mind, with his father’s death. The city matters less as a described landscape than as the place where these two strands of his past took shape.

Study and Intellectual Background

While studying in New York City, Khaled wrote a thesis on unorganized trade in the ancient world, which he titled Black Babylon. His interest had begun much earlier: as a child, his mother introduced him to the black markets of Assyria, Akkad, and Sumer. Before the 1967 war, she had been researching the subject herself. Khaled’s thesis connected those markets to trade routes, taxation, and the empires built around them, bringing a childhood fascination into his own academic work.

Love and Personal History

New York City was also where Khaled and a Jewish woman were fellow students and fell in love. He remembered her as beautiful, intelligent, and perhaps the kindest person he had ever met. Her Reform Jewish parents supported Israel but opposed the occupation of the territories. Khaled’s memory of the relationship is sharpened by its painful coincidence: he was making love to her on the night his father died in an Israeli prison. He later told Lin that he could blame himself for being in love, revealing how closely he had bound private happiness to his family’s political suffering.

Place in Khaled’s Recollection

Khaled recalls New York City while speaking with Lin about the experiences that led him into political struggle. After his father’s death, he returned home and arrived in time for the October War; he later made his way to Tunis for training and continued fighting as far as Beirut. The city therefore marks an earlier life of study and intimacy, before the course of Khaled’s memories turns toward war, displacement, and fighting. Its importance lies in that contrast: New York held both the scholarly beginnings of his interest in illicit trade and a love he could not separate from loss.