Autobiography of a young boy who tried to kill himself at age 12

This was a sad book. The autobiography of the boyhood years of Lebanese playwright, Faysal Farhat (Yawma Bada't Al-Kitabah). I just received the book and finished reading it. The dedication he wrote for me made me sad: it said to "my friend Dr. As`ad..." Why would you call your friend by a title, I thought. Faysal grew up in extreme poverty in Beirut: his father would send him as a little boy to sell chewing gums in the streets of Beirut in the pre-war years. He would subject him to daily torturous and merciless beatings with a whip. He would kick Faysal out and he would be forced to sleep on the streets of Beirut in small boxes. He was always scared of his father and he developed a strong stutter which he retained in his thirties when I met him. His book begins with a suicide scene (and I hate suicides and suicides attempts as much as I hate Zionism): Faysal was going to throw himself into the the sea before he changed his mind--at that very young age. This book only deals with those early years: details of the beatings and the adventures of a very abused child. You read his book and you hate his father (who is now deceased). He--like `Arafat--is not dead enough for me. I met Faysal in the early 1980s when I came to Washington, DC. He was active in the Lebanese Communist Party in Lebanon, and would never understand or accept the world of non-Leninist leftists and anarchists. He had moved in there and was working as dish washer at one of the restaurents near Dupont Circle. We became friends: he once heard that I was sick, and he brought me a pot of hot lentil soup, and it was pretty good I remember it. He would then always try to cook for me, and would offer his services to me in a way that a friend would not offer. He would beg me to let him cook for me or to bring me food. And that bothered me. I felt that he could not transcend the rigid class system that he grew up in, and that his father reinforced on him daily. I also felt that he was not serious about his political beliefs as I thought. And we disagreed on gender, let us say. I then left DC and we did not stay in touch. He went back to Lebanon. He did every manual job imaginable--literally as Joe Biden would say--all his life, but stuck to trying to write and dirct plays. He wrote several of them and some were produced in Beirut and around Lebanon. This is a recent profile of Faysal in Al-Akhbar. He once in a while writes silly letters to An-Nahar, and they annoy the hell out of me. I feel that he just wants to please the prevailing powers in Lebanon. But the book is pretty good and I recommend it. It is very vivid and quite melancholic--as I like my literature and art, perhaps because I am not melancholic.