The Poet From Syria

Family history research is one of the Center for Brooklyn History's most popular research topics. Millions of people can trace their roots back to Brooklyn. Yet despite an abundance of resources available at CBH, piecing together the social history of one's ancestors--or anyone for that matter--can be difficult, exhausting, and full of dead ends. Several months ago, I ran across the name of a young dentist (and poet) in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle who emigrated to Brooklyn from Syria in the early twentieth century. Intrigued, I embarked on the long process of reconstructing his life using primary and secondary sources. Here is Nejib’s story.

Nejib Ibrahim Angelo Katibah was born in Yabrud, Syria in 1874. He arrived in the United States, alone, in 1892 at the age of nineteen.

This date coincides with the first wave of Arab immigration to the United States beginning in the 1870s. The majority of new arrivals, predominantly young men, came from Ottoman controlled Greater Syria (present day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine) seeking economic and educational opportunities. Many were also escaping conscription, heavy taxes, and persecution under a declining Ottoman Empire [1]. Nejib likely came to the United States for these reasons as well. School records indicate he enrolled in several universities on the East Coast in the 1890s, including Williams College and Princeton University.

After graduating from Princeton around 1899, Nejib briefly returned to the Middle East. The details of his life there remain unknown. His naturalization record, featured above, indicates he came back to the US on the Princess Irene via Naples in 1908. Nejib likely headed straight to Maryland after disembarking to attend dental school. His name continues to appear in Baltimore city directories throughout the 1910s. Presumably, he met his wife, Florida-born Mildred Elizabeth McCormick, in Maryland. Census records describe Mildred as 5' 2" with brown eyes and black hair. The couple wed and had two children.

By 1920, the family was living in Brooklyn at 27 Schermerhorn in Brooklyn Heights.

The 1920 census records his occupation as “Dentist."  A third child, Edwin, is also listed as living with the family. Given the information in the record, Edwin is likely Nejib's son from a previous relationship back in Egypt, the details and circumstances of which are now lost. Looking closely at the record, we see another Syrian family renting in the same building as the Katibahs [2]. 

This is not surprising given the area had a thriving Arab-American community replete with numerous shops, bakeries, restaurants, and cafes along Atlantic Avenue. Many of the residents had originally settled along Washington Street in Lower Manhattan. The area, referred to as “Little Syria" [3], served as the commercial, intellectual, and cultural epicenter for the Greater Syrian community of New York until their displacement by the construction of the Battery Park Tunnel and later the World Trade Center [4].

A large Arab-American and Muslim community still resides in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill today.

Nejib was also a poet and writer—perhaps his true calling and principal identity. His classmates in college recognized his literary and oratory talents early on. Nejib was elected “class poet” during his sophomore year at Williams College and a 1897 Princeton yearbook eloquently notes, "It is very apparent that a continuation of his efforts will cause the desert to bloom as a rose."  In 1915, he won second place for his short story "The Sparrow and the Locust" in a writing contest organized by The Baltimore Sun. His poem “The Syrian Poet of Williams College” was published in The Syrian World in 1929, a monthly magazine on Syrian politics and Arabic literature.

The Katibahs eventually left Brooklyn for Queens around 1925. Nejib sadly died of a heart attack in 1931. His wife and children later moved to California.

Interested in conducting your own family history research at CBH? Contact our reference staff at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org or explore our family research guide here.  

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[1] Several early government documents reductively list Nejib’s nationality as "Turkish," a generalized term for citizens of the Ottoman Empire that belies the complications of national identity under Ottoman rule. This was standard practice until around 1899.

[2] Fuad Shatara was an attending surgeon at Cumberland and Long Island College Hospitals. He was also president of the Arab National League. The Shatara family eventually purchased a brownstone at 53 Clinton Street, where Fuad opened his private practice on the ground floor. The family lived there until Fuad's untimely death in 1942.

[3] Local residents referred to their community as the "Mother Colony" while "Little Syria" was largely a Western moniker popularized in print in the late 1890s.

[4] The population of "Little Syria" was already in decline by the 1940s due to the proliferation of transportation options and upward social mobility within the community.