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to evening church services, teenage boys shot and killed on buses or at the movies and tiny children struck by bullets from careless drive-by gunmen. These stories carried a clear message: The police had lost control of the city.
    I asked a reporter who spends a lot of time in Detroit if things were really as dangerous as they seemed in the media. “Are you kidding?” he said. “They’re worse.” And he took me to meet John Aboud.
    Aboud and his two brothers own and operate a small grocery store, the Tailwind Party Store, on the lower east side, in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. Aboud was born in Detroit, in 1956; his parents, Iraqi Christians known as Chaldeans, came to the city from a village not too far from Baghdad.
    The Detroit area has the largest Arab population in the United States, estimated at anywhere from 80,000 to 250,000. Since 1967, Syrians, Palestinians and, especially, Chaldeans (who often do not consider themselves Arabs but are generally regarded as members of the Arab community by outsiders) have replaced the Jews and other white ethnics as the city’s shopkeepers.
    It was a transition I had seen in my own family. After my grandfather was murdered in 1960, my uncle Jack reopened the store. Going in every morning was painful, especially for my aunt Ruth, who was never able to see a new customer without wondering ‘Is he the one?’ But they were working people, the store was their livelihood, and so they stayed on.
    Despite my grandfather’s death, Jack and Ruth did their best to maintain good customer relations. They supplied local softball teams with soft drinks, donated turkeys to church suppers and gave after-school jobs to their customers’ kids. They probably weren’t beloved figures—white grocers in black neighborhoods seldom are. But they were friendly and fair and they had a loyal, mostly black, clientele.
    Early on a Sunday morning in July 1967, Jack got a call from a customer. “You better get down here,” the man said. “All hell’s breaking loose.” By the time he arrived, the store had been looted. “They took everything except some ‘yortzeit’ candles and a few boxes of matzohs,” he said. Within a few hours, Jack Fine was out of business.
    There was no point in trying to reopen the store; the 1967 riot made it clear that white merchants were no longer welcome in Detroit. Jack offered the place to a young black man named Donny who had worked for him as a teenager. He asked only a few thousand dollars for the building and whatever goodwill he had accumulated over the years. Jack promised to work with Donny for six months, until he learned the business. He made the offer because he liked Donny, and because he had nothing better to do.
    Donny wanted to buy the store, but he had no cash. Jack and Ruth went to the Urban League and explained the situation. Officialsthere listened unsympathetically. They had no money to loan, no help to give. “If you want to sell your business to this young man, why don’t you loan him the money to buy it,” they said.
    Jack Fine sold the store to a Syrian family that promptly installed bulletproof glass and put weapons behind the counter, and the same process repeated itself all over town. Today, roughly 70 percent of the neighborhood grocery stores in Detroit are owned by Arab-Americans and Chaldeans.
    These merchants, known locally as A-rabs, are enormously unpopular in the black community. Their control of the city’s petty commerce is a rebuke to blacks, who have been unable or unwilling to set up their own stores. It is generally believed that the Arabs came to America with large sums of money, but this isn’t true. Most of them arrived with very little, worked like demons to save money and, after the 1967 riot, bought businesses at fire sale rates.
    Even today it costs only $60,000 to open a grocery store in Detroit—not an astronomical