My Damascus

Born to a Syrian mother from Damascus and a Palestinian father who fled Jaffa, writer and architect Suad Amiry experienced a childhood in the Syrian capital during the 1960s and 1970s characterized by “strong images of narrow and dilating alleyways, splendid mansions, and colorful, scented souqs.” Yet her narrative reaches even further back into her family’s past, one populated by aunts and uncles, cousins and close friends—a multigenerational get-together between the pages of a book that oscillates seamlessly across the years between the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, around the time of World War I, and the present day, with its equally war-ravaged fallout. The stately, 18th-century Baroudi family mansion (Beit Jiddo, the author’s maternal “Grandfather’s House”) is the setting for encounters with aunts lounging on “beautifully inlaid mother-of-pearl Damascene living-room furniture.” But beneath the poshness lies a “sense of loss and uprootedness” that haunts many Palestinian families and undergirds this lyrical, nostalgic memoir.

—Tom Verde