[Book Review]: "The Home I Worked to Make: Voices From the New Syrian Diaspora"

Abstract

Following her earlier work, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled,in which a collective We echoed the shared experience of Syriansduring the 2011 revolution, war and flight, American historianand political scientist of the Middle East Wendy Pearlman tracesthe dispersion of voices in The Home I Worked to Make, wherethe multiplicity of individual experiences of the Syrian displace-ment leads to what she identifies as The New Syrian Diaspora.Pearlman continues where public attention begins to fade inthe aftermath of the crisis, sharing the Syrians' need to try tomake sense of it all. While conducting hundreds of interviewswith Syrians across five continents, she discovers a key term-home-and requests ‘permission to enter conversations thatmany Syrians were already having with each other or withinthemselves’ (p. 24). She asks the question that frames the entirebook: What does home mean to you? Valuable lessons arise bothfrom the presence and absence of answers, and from the inter-viewing process-beginning with finding people who feel theneed to share their stories and ending months or years later witha return to seek approval of and revisit the narratives they told,many of which have since evolved. The Home I Worked to Makeis a collection of snapshots of how people from Syria made senseof home at a particular moment after displacement…