Lifestyle
‘My losses started the day I was born’: A poet on what it’s like to call Gaza home
Mosab Abu Toha and his wife and children are currently living in Syracuse, N.Y., where he is a fellow at the University of Syracuse.
Penguin Random House
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Penguin Random House
Five days after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha fled his home in Gaza, along with his wife and their three young children. Two weeks later, their home was bombed, leaving it in rubble.
“I say that I am houseless, but I am not homeless,” Abu Toha says. “I have a home to return to, which is Palestine.”
Abu Toha and his family initially took shelter in a refugee camp. When the camp was bombed, they moved to a school that had been turned into a shelter by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Eventually, he was able to get passports that enabled the family to leave Gaza. But while crossing into Egypt, Abu Toha says he was detained for two days and beaten by Israeli soldiers who claimed he was a member of Hamas.
Abu Toha has chronicled his life and his family’s journey in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and also in his new book of poetry, Forest of Noise. He says that as a Palestinian who was born in a refugee camp, “My losses started the day I was born.”
“I lost my childhood,” he says. “I’m a Palestinian refugee who lost 31 members of my extended family, who was wounded in an airstrike in 2009 when I was 16 years old, who lost his house, who lost 300 friends.”
Abu Toha and his wife and children are currently living in Syracuse, N.Y., where he is a fellow at the University of Syracuse. He says the decision to leave his extended family behind in Gaza was one of the hardest choices he’s ever made.
“If there was one reason why I left Gaza, it was just to save my children because I couldn’t provide food to everyone in Gaza,” he says. “If I’m inside [Gaza], that’s true, that I could be close to my parents and my siblings and my relatives and my students, too. But I can’t do anything when I’m there except just to stay close to them, to die with them, to suffer with them.”
Forest of Noise
Penguin Random House
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Penguin Random House
Interview highlights
On his family members who are still in Gaza
My family in Gaza has been devastated. … My father and two of my siblings moved from north Gaza to Gaza City. And while another sister of mine with her three children are still in north Gaza, and in one voice message that my sister managed to send me, seven days after I lost contact with her, I could hear the Israeli gunfire. I could hear the airstrikes. I could hear the artillery shelling. …
People do not feel safe while they are inside their houses because they … could be bombed at any moment, just like what happened to our house last October. But also, they can’t even leave the house to look for food and look for medicine and look for water. This is the case of not a family or two. It’s about hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of families.
On trying to comfort his three young children
I was able to leave Gaza in December last year, and we lived in Egypt for about six months before we came to the States. And the first few days after we left Gaza, the children kept asking about their grandparents, about their cousins and about every relative they knew. Sometimes they would bring up the names of their friends. And by the way, one of my children lost a very close friend of hers, and I didn’t tell her about that. It’s really horrific. … I’m not sure if we go back to Gaza one day, she will ask about this friend of hers from kindergarten. So when we came here to the States, I noticed that my children stopped asking a lot of questions about what’s happening in Gaza. And I think this is good and bad at the same time.
On the trauma of his childhood resurfacing as a father
I’m someone who has never lived in peace in Gaza. I mean, the only sound I could hear was the drones buzzing. … When I go to the sea to swim with friends or even to have a picnic there, I could see the gunboats. Everything in Gaza reminds me of the occupation. … My frightening childhood shaped me. And I’m still traumatized from childhood. And I’m also traumatized as a father who could barely protect his children in Gaza. I was taken away from my children. And I mean, I could see myself in the eyes of my children when they scream. Each time they hit an airstrike, each time they get hungry because there is not enough food. … The starvation started early on after October 7th. I spent a lot of time in the street looking for food, looking for water for my children. So it is terrible to be a child in Gaza.
On having access to food that people in Gaza don’t have
When you eat something that other people don’t have access to, it feels terrible. I mean, again, I’m not living by myself. I’m not living alone. When we left for Egypt, I was sitting at the table with my wife and kids and eating and my son … would stop eating and ask, “Is my grandmother eating?” And he would start crying. I mean, this is a child who is 8 years old and he has empathy with other people. … And one time he started to cry asking whether his friends from the neighborhood were still alive. … It is terrible to be a parent in Gaza.
On his use of the word “genocide” [Editor’s note: “Genocide” is a legal term. While Israel has been accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the Israeli government strongly denies the accusation and the court has yet to make a final ruling, although a preliminary ruling found it “plausible” that Israel has violated the Genocide Convention.]
I know that it is a controversial term, but it’s not controversial when we see, especially now with what’s happening in north Gaza, where Israel separated Gaza City from north Gaza, where they are bombing people right now. So I think the word ‘holocaust’ started to be used, I think, 20 years after the Holocaust happened. So why do we really have to wait until the genocide has all that it needs to be called a genocide in order to call it that term? And I’m wondering whether the word really is lacking here, because what Israel has been doing and this is found in the rhetoric of the Israeli officials — they want to exterminate people in Gaza. They cut off electricity. What do you call it when you cut off electricity, when you cut off food, when you cut off water, when you when you target ambulances? I mean, what do you call this? I mean, do we really have all have to die in order for them to call it genocide? I mean, it’s enough, the way they are killing us in Gaza.
On why he doesn’t want to talk about Hamas
Hamas is a faction. … Whatever they say, they are not representing all Palestinians. So the rhetoric they are using, they represent themselves. Whatever the Israelis are saying, they are saying it as a country. So whatever Hamas is saying, whatever they are doing, they are not doing it as a state, we do not have an army. So you can say Hamas is not the Palestinians. And I do not have to agree with everything that Hamas says because I’m not Hamas. …
Israel [is] besieging us and bombing us and preventing us from building an airport. Why don’t we talk about these things? Let’s stop talking about Hamas. Let’s talk about what happened before October 7th. What happened before Hamas was established in 1987? Hamas is not the cause of the problem. This has been going on for decades, not for a year. Everyone in the world should understand this is not about October 7th. And even if there is a ceasefire, let’s be clear about this, even if there is a ceasefire, this doesn’t mean that there will be peace, because the same problems that led to October 7th, the occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, it still continues.
Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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