Teach a man to ’bish
Iconic card game part of Lebanese cultural contribution to Cape Breton
Cape Breton may be the home of our hearts, but a Lebanese immigrant added diamonds, spades and clubs to the mix when he arrived here more than 100 years ago.
As Nova Scotia marks Lebanese Heritage Month for the first time, some readers may be surprised to learn that the quintessential Cape Breton card game of tarabish — pronounced tar-bish and often shortened to ’bish — wasn’t concocted in a coal mine, fabricated at the steel plant, or hauled out of the sea. Rather, in all likelihood, the trick-taking game that made bella, bait, trick, trump and 50 with the bells part of the island’s patois was introduced to the area by George Shebib, who emigrated from the Middle East to Sydney in 1901.
While the evidence is largely anecdotal, Ian Brodie, an associate Cape Breton meets Lebanon in this illustration that replaces the green cedar tree in the Lebanese flag with an outline of the island. As Nova Scotia marks Lebanese Heritage Month for the first time, many people may not realize that tarabish, the quintessential Cape Breton card game, was likely introduced to the area by a Lebanese immigrant named George Shebib.
professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, said the Shebib story is probably true. He compared tarabish to cabbage rolls. Like the Polish dish, he said the card game was so thoroughly adopted by Cape Bretoners that people consider
it local, not ethnic.
Brodie said tarabish is now a “medium for Cape Breton sociability and a symbol of Cape Breton identity.”
“More importantly, I think by locating it through the Lebanese-Syrian community, it brings an implicit narrative of multiculturalism to the Cape Breton story,” he told the Post in an email from Prague, Czech Republic, where he was delivering a lecture about stand-up comedy. “The ubiquity of tarabish is proof that industrial Cape Breton is not a monoculture but something more than the sum of its parts.”
Fr. Albert Maroun is a wellknown figure in the local Lebanese community. He grew up playing tarabish, and at 87, he still goes to the Cedars Club on Thursday and Friday nights for dollar-a-game hands.
Founded by the St. Joseph’s Lebanese and Syrian Benevolent Society of Sydney, the club is located in the same area of Townsend Street where Maroun grew up. It’s also where the first nationless Lebanese newcomers laid down roots at the turn of the century after leaving what was then Syria and the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
According to the society, the Hanna and Libbus families were the first to settle in Sydney. Soon after, they began building three-storey wooden homes on Townsend Street that were known as the Hanna Block and the Libbus Block. The first floor typically consisted of the family business and a few smaller shops, while the families often lived on the second and third floors.
“They called it the Gaza Strip, which had nothing to with Lebanon,” recalled Maroun, whose father Thomas, along with his brother and two sisters, came to Sydney in 1912 to join the what was by then a flourishing Lebanese community. “Word got back that it was a good place to come, that there were jobs in the steel plant and coal mines, so they began to come over in quite large numbers and landed at Saint John, N.B., and Halifax, and then they migrated to wherever their relatives were, like Sydney.”
Many of the Lebanese who didn’t land jobs at the steel plant or coal mines started their own businesses. Maroun’s father operated a corner store out of the family home on Townsend Street, working long hours so he could cater to steelworkers headed to the plant in the morning and returning home at night. He later opened Maroun’s Fruit Store — easily identified by the four-by-eight window full of fruit — and began buying Lebanese staples wholesale from Montreal and selling it to local families who had trouble finding the ingredients to make things like kibbeh, fatayers, grape leave rolls, hummus and tabbouleh.
“They all did very well because the ones who would leave were entrepreneurial — they were aggressive enough to leave, and although it was hard for them to leave their families and so on, they sought a better life,” said Maroun.
Today the Lebanese legacy lives on. Much like cabbage rolls, Lebanese dishes like fatayers and kibbeh are familiar fare at family gatherings around Cape Breton, regardless of heritage. As well, many Lebanese people made lasting impressions in the worlds of business and sports. The late John Abbass became synonymous with photography in Cape Breton as owner of Abbass Studios, while hockey legend John (Junior) Hanna made history as the first NHL player of Lebanese descent, and Fabian Joseph captained his hometown Cape Breton Oilers before winning two Olympic silver medals with Team Canada.
A former Maronite Catholic priest and physics professor, Maroun has also made a name for himself as a prominent philanthropist and political activist. He was inducted into the Cape Breton Business and Philanthropy Hall of Fame for donating about $500,000 to various charities over the years — including more than $300,000 to the Cape Breton Regional Hospital Foundation. More recently he’s made headlines as the face of Nova Scotians for Equalization Fairness, a government watchdog group he founded to fight for equalization reform.
George Shebib’s cultural contribution, however, has been largely forgotten, Maroun said.
“People just know they play tarabish and that’s it — they don’t know the origins,” he said. “And it’s a shame, too, that we’ve lost a lot of the connections to explain these things to people.”