Syria Refugee

This timely and powerful novel tells the story of three different children seeking refuge. Josef is a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world. Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety in America. Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe.

Family matriarch and Holocaust survivor Nora Wojnaswki is about to become the oldest woman in the world, and her family are determined to celebrate in style. Her great granddaughter, Debs, however, is not too happy about being left in charge of the party. It’s been a struggle to get the Rabbi to commit to a date and the large Wojnaswki clan can’t agree on what food should be served. Only, Debs’s problems are just beginning. Because Nora isn’t your average centenarian, and she has other ideas.

Beneath the stars, on a stony beach, stand two brothers. They are wearing lifejackets that are too big for them and their most precious belongings are sealed in waterproof bags tucked inside the rucksacks on their backs. Turkey is behind them. Two or three kilometres' swim away is the Greek island of Samos, now only a smudge in the moonlight.

Jamal Saeed arrived as a refugee in Canada in 2016. In his native Syria, as a young man, his writing pushed both social and political norms. For this reason, as well as his opposition to the regimes of the al-Assads, he was imprisoned on three occasions for a total of 12 years. In each instance, he was held without formal charge and without judicial process. My Road from Damascus not only tells the story of Saeed’s severe years in Syria’s most notorious military prisons but also his life during the country’s dramatic changes.