The study of Mahjar literature across the Americas has historically coalesced around the literary output emerging from urban centers. Cities like New York City, São Paolo, and Buenos Aires anchored early Arab literary communities who often gravitated towards the Arabic-language press. Despite this anchoring, incoming populations of Arab émigrés were on the move, whether across national borders, or within national boundaries. A focus on patterns of movement after migration to the Americas itself raises new questions for scholars of this literature, who have paid increased attention of late to émigrés' transnational connections, border crossings, and experiences moving outside of urban nodes. In the United States alone, historian Sarah Gualtieri’s work suggests a refocus of attention away from New York City, and towards intra-American migrations. This paper will focus on transnational currents at play in the North American Mahjar through a more contemporary literary reimagining of this place and time. Tablit al-Bahr (2003) by the Lebanese author Rashid al-Daif is a work of historical fiction that stages a classic emigration pattern from the Lebanese Mountains, through Marseille, and then to New York City. This classic pattern then expands, as the protagonist continues on to St. Louis and its rural environs, and spends time in Cuba, where he meets a Chinese immigrant who he later marries. This contemporary work of historical fiction, in reimagining the experience of Arab emigration also contests common tropes of Mahjar history, paralleling Gualtieri’s historical work in foregrounding intra-American migrations, not to mention inter-ethnic contact zones. This paper will analyze how this contemporary Lebanese novel challenges established literary and historical motifs of the Mahjar, while also standing at a historical distance from its object of reimagination, thereby more broadly reassessing this formative period of Modern Arabic Literature.