The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora

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)