Alia Malek paints a romantic picture of a prewar Syria.
By BEN FISHERA shop selling vegetables is seen at al-Shikh Muhialdin in Damascus in August 2008(photo credit: REUTERS)
For so many in the Western world whose newspapers and TV channels have been flooded with the daily, horrific news coming from Syria’s ongoing six-year civil war, the country is a black hole of bloodshed and misery. Alia Malek’s new book, The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria, seeks to remind readers that Syria was once a multicultural nation, where families, vibrant neighborhoods and even tourism flourished.She paints a romantic picture of prewar Damascus with such descriptive details that it can become almost pedantic at times.“Arriving on each floor, standing on the last step, you come to a rectangular hallway, 14 feet deep and eight feet wide,” she writes of the dimensions of her grandmother’s house, recounting Syria of the 1950s. Things as petty as neighborhood spats are presented through rose-colored glasses, and Malek artistically uses the smells and sound of Damascus’s Ain al- Kirish neighborhood to pull off a remarkable feat: she makes you want to visit Syria.The book melds stories of her family with geopolitics and covers more than 100 years of Syrian history. It is peppered with photos of the author’s family, which gives it an even more familiar feel.In addition to waxing nostalgic about the time before the war, she provides fascinating insight about why things turned out the way they did. For instance, she explains how, decades ago, many Syrians moved to Gulf Arab countries to work, and then brought the extremist ways of countries like Saudi Arabia along with them when they returned home, which helps to explain the rise of Islamist elements in the country in recent years.Malek, who comes from Syrian Christian stock, is able to seamlessly blend her own family history with the history of the country, from her great-grandfather, born an Ottoman subject in a village outside Hama, to her last days in Syria in 2013, when distant in-laws and cousins of cousins are suspected of being informants of the mukhabarat, dictator Bashar Assad’s dreaded secret police.Syria’s Jewish community also plays a part in the story. Malek goes as far as New York to search for two Jewish sisters who had attended her baptism in Syria. One lives there and the other in Israel: “Stella still spoke broken Hebrew, and she no longer worked. When I asked if she was happy, she answered that life had not turned out as she had planned, but she felt blessed to be living close to her family.”Malek, who was inspired by the sisters to write her master’s thesis on Syrian Jews, writes that the decimation of Syria’s Jewish community – first after the establishment of the State of Israel and then after the Six Day War – did not bode well for the country’s future.“That an ancient Syrian community could be amputated from the Syrian body politic because it was inconvenient always felt like a frightening precedent.”Despite Syria’s loathing of Israel, Malek, in an interesting anecdote, recounts how during wars with the Zionist entity, Syrians would tune into Israeli radio stations to find out what was really happening on the battlefield since Syrian government stations couldn’t be trusted.
The book’s title refers to the saga of the Malek family apartment. After the author’s tortured grandmother – whose photo adorns the dedication page, and felt that she was “less a part of the family because she was not a son” – moves to a different apartment to accommodate her family, a struggling author and his wife moved in. Eventually, the family wanted to pass down the apartment to Malek’s mother, but due to a Syrian legal code preventing the eviction of a tenant who was paying rent if they happened to be a veteran, the struggling author continued to rent for three decades despite the family’s pleas for him to move. Eventually, the family paid him a massive sum to vacate, and regained control of the apartment.Since her grandmother, the home’s original inhabitant, was long dead, Malek goes to Syria with her father to renovate and then live in the apartment.“We had at last gotten our house back from the man who had refused to leave, and he had extracted a heavy price from us in the process,” she wrote. “I wondered now if Syrians could get their country back and what it might cost the people.”As of now, the Syrians haven’t found success in regaining their country and still languish under Assad, the dictator that the late journalist Christopher Hitchens referred to as a “cretinous little dauphin.”After military help from Russian and Iranian- backed groups, the territorial gains the army has made on the rebels and on ISIS have made it apparent that Assad has no intention of leaving. While most laymen probably don’t hold Assad in high esteem, after reading Malek’s memoir of Syria, highly critical of the him, readers will hope and potentially work even harder for his ouster, for the sake of the future of the people of Syria.