In every small Middle Eastern store or international grocery we walk into at home in the San Francisco Bay Area or anywhere across the country, my mother and I search for Saboun Nabulsi. We weave through narrow aisles packed with cans of fava beans and jars of pickled eggplant, past the giant plastic tubs brimming with olives, the bags of pita bread spilling from the bottom shelves. If we are lucky, we find the most treasured import: the saboun (soap), wrapped in waxy white paper stamped with the fading red camel, blue barcode, the bright Arabic script that stretches across each side of the rough cube, always a tiny bit askew. We are careful shoppers, but for Saboun Nabulsi, we will pay almost any price.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, a man who learned from his father, who learned from his father, mixes virgin olive oil pressed from local olive trees with water and an alkalizing sodium lye compound. He stirs it with a wooden paddle in a massive stainless-steel vat. Days later he and his team pour the thick boiling liquid into a large wooden frame spanning the factory floor. The mixture sets, and the men step across soap to mark a grid of lines across the top. They bend at the waist, cutting along the lines with a long wooden stick fitted with a sharp blade. They squat on the surface with embossing hammers, swiftly stamping the top of each cube, like xylophone players performing in a concert. They stand on stools to stack the soap in circular hollow towers so the air can circulate around each bar. The soap hardens and cures for weeks until being packaged, sent away.
