The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria Hardcover – February 28, 2017

Alia Malek, using the reconstruction of her grandmother’s home as a framework, offers an introduction to Syria, not only its political history but also its social organization. The reader marvels along with the author at her reacquaintance with an enormous extended family. One feels like a bystander reading vivid evocations of a social network embracing neighbors of differing faiths. And one feels outrage at the deliberate destruction of such a caring community. Malek’s peculiar blend of citizenships has allowed her both the intimacy of access and the perspective of detachment. This is a beautiful book.

There's so much more to Syria than its conflicts: I think this book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand that. Period.Malek's book begins by narrating the country's birth, first through the story of her larger-than-life great-grandfather and mother. (I foresee a movie adaptation, beginning with Marta building ovens to feed the poor). We get to know her grandmother's Damascus apartment block, where Malek herself lived in 2012. In the opening chapters, history I'd thought I knew felt reframed, and coloured by these characters. She makes abstract-seeming personas tangible, even the founder of Baath and rival Islamic and secular factions becoming personalities. The book's pace quickens with Malek's first visit to Syria in 1992, and reels you into its novelistic-feeling narrative. I'd meant to read it slowly, but could barely put it down.If you're as suspicious of memoirs as I am, rest assured that Malek's book is one of the the exceptions (it reminded me of Isabel Allende's PAULA, Karol Nielsen's BLACK ELEPHANTS, or Dexter Filkins' THE FOREVER WAR). Malek keeps the focus tight; she leaves out much of her life when not in Syria. We only learn about Salma's granddaughter, and we grow to love her cousins and her home. The vivid descriptions made me miss the Syria I will now never know, from multi-religious Damascus to "Aleppo's great restaurants" (a phrase I never thought I'd read). Losses that preceded her story are just as vivid: the loss of Damascus' once-thriving Jewish Quarter, brought me to tears.This book doesn't just belong on your shelf. It belongs in your heart.

This is an intellectually and emotionally exhausting read.Alia Malek is the child of Syrian Christians who emigrated to America while the mother was pregnant with their first child - her. She set out to write a biography of her grandmother Salma, and this book is the result.Much of the book's first third is, indeed, a biography of Salma. She was a strong woman in a place and times where strong women had limits put on them (not to say that there are no other such places and times...), and expressed her strength in ways consistent with those limits, while chafing at them. Malek paints her ancestors with a broad-ish brush, but, as Van Gogh proved, a broad brush can be very expressive indeed.The book's second part, and shortest, covers with an even broader brush the time from Salma's death in 1982, to Alia Malek's own move to Damascus in April of 2011. Her intentions in moving there were, first, to renovate and live in Salma's "house" (actually an apartment she owned a building called the Tahaan), and second, to research her family's history, and especially Salma's.Part three, about half the book, covers the time from her moving to Damascus, to her final(?) departure in May of 2013. Some of it is indeed about her researches. Some is about being an American (of Syrian descent) in Syria - and in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Armenia - during those first years of the "Arab Spring," as conditions in Syria went from _scary_ to _hellish_. And some - starting from part one, really - is about the development and decay of Syria as an independent country.Modern Syria is a dismantled subset of the "greater Syria," _Bilad al-Sham_, which was dismantled and redistricted by the French and English during the "Mandates." (Most of modern Israel is in "historic Syria," and of course the Golan Heights are conquered Syrian territory.) Stating this baldly is not an argument against (or for) the right of the modern Israeli nation-state to exist; but every fact about the historical situation helps to understand what it is today.After modern Syria was "granted" "independence" in the aftermath of WWII, governments came and went like the changing of underwear, usually as dirty - and usually by coup. The rise of Hafez al-Assad in 1971 was a relief to many Syrians: he brought a kind of stability, and he was not (much) worse than the governments who had preceeded him. A Ba'athist, he at first attempted a kind of socialist reform (all the while protecting his own rule), then, when the government went broke, turned to a sort of state capitalism where a business needed a "partner" in the Assad inner circles.Bashar al-Assad was not meant to succeed his father; he studied to be an optometrist. But his older brother died in a car crash, and Bashar was quickly groomed to replace him. For whatever reason, he proved to be a more paranoid and tyrannical ruler - sorry, "President" - than his father ever was (and he was no slouch in the tyrannical department).Malek paints the ongoing crisis/civil war/disintegration of Syria in terms that make it very clear that at least in her view - Bashar is crazy like a fox, that every act of the government is carried out with the clear-eyed purpose of not only keeping Bashar al-Assad in power, but keeping the government blameless in the crisis, painting itself as heroically keeping Syria together while "terrorists" and "foreign agitators" are to blame for all the violence. As of 2013, Malek makes clear, there were still a significant population of Damascenes who either believed it or pretended to.Meanwhile: Alia Malek, and her father, successfully redeemed Salma's house from people who were for all purposes legally squatting, restored it, and lived in it (though her father could only stay a day before returning to America). Malek spent a little over two years mostly in Damascus, under at least some suspicion by the _mukhabarat_ (secret police) of being a spy. People she knew were "taken," some permanently, some for shorter "stays." She gathered information, not only about Syria (some of which she, a journalist, published), but about her family, its history, its friends, and so on; and finally left when pressure from her family and friends - whom her presence might endanger - led her to do so, returning to America for the launch of Al Jazeera America.Malek writes well, clearly, and with passion. Her story, or stories, are emotionally wrenching at times.Pray for the people of Syria.

I came across Alia by pure coincidence, and my first read of hers was "A Country Called Amreeka"; as an expatriate Middle Eastern living in Europe, I totally identified with each and every person she wrote about, and the ignorance that sometimes we have to suffer from others because they cannot understand that there is diversity and multitude in every part of the world...I waited impatiently for the release of "The Home That Was Our Country", and can honestly say I have enjoyed every single page of it... Alia wrote it for everyone, whether an Arab (Syrian or not) or a Westerner, you will be able to understand the book and live the lives of the people depicted in the book;As I have been to many of the places in her book, the accuracy of Alia's descriptions transported me back there and if I close my eyes I could feel myself walking in those streets and visiting those cities... What's happening in Syria, and its repercussions on the rest of the region, is very sad.. However, I felt deeply grateful for Alia for she gave me a glimpse of hope, although a tiny one, that a day will come when we will live again like AbdelJawwad and his family did....

If you are Syrian and feeling isolated and desperate from watching the news, this book will lift your spirits and remind you that you are not alone. If you are not Syrian, and want to understand how Syria ended up in such a mess, this book will walk you through Syria's past and present. If you just feel like getting lost in a good book, this family story will capture you. I cannot recommend this book enough. Buy it, and I promise you will enjoy it thoroughly!

When I was 7 years old, my parents moved me and my sister to Delhi from the sleepy city of Kolkata. After a devastating personal loss, my father stepped into India’s capital looking for what thousands of others were looking for, a future of hope. Over the next 18 years, stability eluded us, and with that hope of ever finding a footing in the city I came to love with all my heart, seemed just that, hope. That first move paved the way for 6 more intracity moves by the time I was 25. Then, I got married and finally found my anchor, not just in my beloved city but in life while my parents made one more move, and hopefully the last, this time to a place that would be theirs.When I reminisce about all the moves that had marked my growing-up years, the only thing that I miss and regret is not having a history. A legacy that I could say I have inherited from my parents, if not grandparents, unlike all of my cousins. The numerous changes in the IDs, personal documents, school, and even telling friends that I have yet another new address, felt exhausting. Reading The Home That Was Our Country by Alia Malek made me realize how naive my exhaustion was compared to the millions of Syrians who had to leave not only their homes but the land on which they had their legacies.This heart-wrenching tale of the unraveling of modern-day Syria capturing the developments (or not so) from the dawn of the 20th century to Syria as we know it today, war-torn, left me deeply disturbed. Isn’t this eerily similar to how the Holocaust was carried out?Who would remember the Syria that was, and who would be there to greet its new dawn and dream it a better future?Alia returns to her native city of Damascus in the aftermath of the Arab Spring that once had taken hold of the Middle East and captured the imaginations of an entire generation of people living within its boundaries. With her, she brings her open dream of living in the house that once belonged to her grandmother Salma, the matriarch of her mother’s side of the family and the other disguised, that of reporting on the going on in Syria.After the ousting of Hosni Mubarak from Egypt, the Syrians too dared to look up and ask for reforms from their government. Helmed by Bashar al-Assad, son of Hafez al-Assad, who has been in power since 1970 after the last major coup in the country, the regime turns what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration into ugly armed retribution directed towards its own citizens. As the protests creep into the country, so does the secret police, Mukhabarat, that Assad holds dear. Anyone who has the slightest connection with the protesting or harbor views against the regime is arrested and taken to God knows where. Most are never seen again. Later, it is everyone.While Alia takes us on the journey that tore her beloved country apart, she also talks of a time when a more secular Syria was peaceful. One where they united against the French colonizers, one where her great grandmother tore down her walls to feed the hungry refugees fleeing their countries, one where her grandmother Salma had made her life’s mission to serve her fellow country people and turned into a sheikha of her own salon, one where her mother Lamya grew up dreaming of making a future and family of her own, and one where Alia herself came back for the holidays, first annually and then more randomly. With every visit, her views on the country that is hers but yet not hers, change. She begins to feel the connection that she never felt with her birth country America and thinks of life here, where she has a legacy to hold onto.As the war engulfs the areas around her, Alia, with a fearlessness that is hard to visualize and an adamancy to hope for a future in Syria, stays put for as long as she can before flying away, this time, with a heart filled with despair for the home that could have been.While the rest of the world became obsessed with the fall of Assad and when that would happen, these citizens were more concerned with the loss of Syria.Each time I read a war story, whether a memoir or fictionalized, I feel suffocated. I feel choked by the very hands of humanity that are meant to serve others. Most stories I’ve read are from the last century. Something about the 1900s made it remarkable, developments in science, faith, population, and also war. For once I had actually thought the 2000s wouldn’t bring in any kind of war, at least a civil war, given the majority of the countries of the world are ruled democratically. But what are humans if not ambitious? A man’s greed to hold on to power that was never his to wield, and in process, rendering millions of people homeless and displaced, ironically the same people over whom he was supposedly ruling, has left me wondering if we have really advanced as a species?A country with a great history has been ruined beyond repair. A regime that was supposed to safeguard its people from harm ended up as their perpetrators. Rampant corruption, cronyism, and constant personal surveillance were trade-offs for stifling survival and close to nil opportunities. Borders were redrawn, this time on sectarian lines. Refugee camps started to crop up at the unlikeliest of places. The tortured corpses of the dead were buried wherever little space was found. The houses shattered under constant fire from the endless machine guns. Women widowed, kids orphaned. Fear and submission came naturally. Intolerance prevailed. Human hypocrisy peaked yet humanitarian help poured. And the world? It watched.Written lucidly, Alia’s tone is more factful than emotional. Though the beginning was a rough start for me because of the plethora of details that she throws in, I got into grove once I got hang of her writing and the history of Syria. The characters were aplenty, and for the sake of the reader, I’d give it to her for writing one-liners about them for recall when they suddenly appeared chapters later. While the plot really centered around Salma and Alia’s bear obsession with her flat in Tahaan, her family history was interspersed with the political scene in Syria, from the early 1900s to now. Except for Salma and Alia herself, none of the characters really left a mark. If these two ladies were the cake and the cherry on top, others were mere crumbs. Their growth was spectacularly visible by the end of their lives in Syria, one dead and one gone for good. Despite the fact that others were a necessity to the story Alia is trying to tell, none were given any credits. A story that could have been more power-packed with emotions, alas, fell flat on its face in those terms but delivered the situation it was meant to do - a country forgotten by everyone. Yet, I recommend it. Read, because it will open your eyes and mind to what was, is, and can be in the blink of an eye.