The home I worked to make Voices from the new Syrian diaspora

Author Pearlman first started interviewing Syrians who had chosen or been forced to leave their homes back during the 2011 Arab Spring. She has continued these efforts as thousands more Syrian refugees disperse across the planet, fleeing the repressive, autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad. She previously shared some of these five-hundred transcribed conversations in We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled (2017). In this new offering, Pearlman pulls together reflections on the meaning of home as explored by over seventy contributors. The interviews vary in length, style, tone, and topic, but individual voices come through vividly as people relate their experiences and share their feelings. The honest and authentic transcriptions evoke strong emotions, whether the contributors are reliving episodes of unimaginable hardship and torture or reminiscing about missing a certain flower or home-cooked delicacy. Pearlman includes a detailed introductory time line and provides thoughtful commentary to set historical and political context as she cycles through seven thematic sections: Leaving, Leaving Again, Searching, Losing, Building, Belonging, and Living. These compelling testimonials deserve a wide audience.

Syrian refugees grapple with feelings of alienation as they try to make new homes around the globe in this moving account from political scientist Pearlman (We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled). Drawing on a decade's worth of interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians, Pearlman traces their movement through several life stages (e.g., "leaving," "seeking," "belonging," and, if they eventually manage to feel at home somewhere new, simply "living"). Tracking her subjects' evolving emotions, Pearlman uses their experiences to shed light on the idea of home; she contends that, because most Syrian refugees had planned to spend their lives in the same towns in which their families had dwelled for generations, they possess uniquely poignant views on the topic. The accumulated weight of their often harrowing narratives reveals that those who succeeded in reaching the "living" stage had to labor hard at the task of nurturing a sense of home within themselves. Their accounts, relayed in first person, have a poetic quality ("Syrians my age in Germany learned to hate Syria. I understood them completely. Erase anything called Syria from your thoughts and look forward"; "Once I was... in Khartoum and saw a funeral gathering... and started to cry. Not because it was a funeral, but because everybody there knew each other"). The result is a haunting rumination on what it means to belong somewhere. (July)

A collection of interviews with Syrian refugees about their conceptions of home. When Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled, began interviewing Syrian refugees in 2011, she thought she was going to write about the Arab Spring. When the theme of home emerged from her conversations with more than 500 participants, she began to seek deeper truths. "Commentators have analyzed the Syrian war through lenses such as protest, violence, geopolitics, sectarianism, extremism, and refugee crisis," she writes. "Fewer have considered what Syrians' extraordinary experiences can teach us about something so commonplace that it touches every human life: home." Pearlman's inquiry leads to a set of stunningly diverse stories that paint a picture of not only the traumatic displacement of the Syrian diaspora, but also the profundity with which Syrians approach their exile from their country. In one story, a gay refugee defines home as a place where he can be himself. After a rocky start in Trogen, Germany, one refugee's insistence on being helpful to his new community resulted in a loving relationship with a German woman who insisted that he call her "Oma," the German word for grandmother. In Turkey, a devastating earthquake helped a Syrian Australian man realize the depth of care he could expect from his newfound Australian community. In another moving story, a doctor chronicles a life-changing experience in Khartoum, Sudan, that reconnected her with her faith. Pearlman weaves these tales together beautifully, artfully teasing out their commonalities, complexities, and contradictions. No matter how dark the content, the author effectively centers the voices of refugees, drawing unexpected and incisive conclusions from her rich data. Pearlman includes a detailed chronology that runs up to August 2023. A stunningly curated text that "strikes at the core of what it means to exist as a person in the world." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.