Stranger in the desert A family story

Salama (Every Day the River Changes, 2021) grew up in suburban New York surrounded by diverse cultures and languages. His paternal grandparents had come to New York from Argentina, while his mother's family emigrated from Iraq. His parents' shared language was English, so that's what Salama grew up speaking. One Thanksgiving, he found his abuelo's writing on their family history, "Historia Antigua," which chronicled their Jewish family's migrations--often forced--through Syria to Argentina. The author's great-grandfather had been a traveling salesman through the Andes Mountains, and rumors held that he may have fathered children along the trade routes. Inspired to better understand his heritage, Salama sets out to retrace his great-grandfather's route and find the "Lost Salamas." He intersperses the story of his journey with letters to his grandparents, his grandparents' writings, excerpts from Facebook posts attempting to connect to lost relatives in Argentina, and flashbacks to growing up in New York. A nonchronological personal narrative rather than a standard travel memoir, Stranger in the Desert is a reflection on family history, identity, and storytelling.

A South American journey explores the persistence of memory. Salama went to Argentina in search of old stories but wound up writing a new one. Leaving his native New York to follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, a yarn-spinning wandering salesman, the author discovered that reconnecting with his living South American relatives was more rewarding than chasing a phantom. Salama's follow-up to his exceptional literary debut, Every Day the River Changes, is more tightly focused, personal, and intimate. Traveling from Buenos Aires to the foot of the Andes to the Bolivian border, he finds none of the elusive "Lost Salamas" he's hoped to meet. Instead, he locates a deeper, enriched identity. His meld of Syrian, Iraqi, and Argentine heritage had always intrigued him, provoking lingering questions. But it was the odyssey begun by uncovering his paternal grandfather's cache of family histories that propelled his project, and he augmented his adventures with years of digital conversations with family members across the world. "Stories," he writes, "are currency for survival in a world where we are perpetually faced with the prospect of our demise….The stories we leave behind will form the mark of an existence." Like his first book, Salama blends travelogue with historical perspective and journalism, but he probes his subject from the outside as well as the inside. He grapples with the legacy of Arab Jews who fled the failing Ottoman Empire for new lives abroad, sustaining their cultural distinctiveness while integrating into their adopted homes, and notes how he gained greater appreciation for his ancestors. The narrative is not quite as riveting as the author's debut, nor does it possess the same power to transform our view of a country and its people. Nonetheless, Salama's rapport with readers remains unquestioned. An accomplished sophomore effort from an unusually gifted young writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"Kan ya makan..." It happened, or it didn't happen; it was so, or it wasn't so. The Arabic phrase for "once upon a time" always means a story is coming. What follows can be as grand as a tale from One Thousand and One Nights--the legendary Middle Eastern collection of fables in which the vizier's daughter Scheherazade tells stories in order to save herself from being killed--or as ordinary as a family legend told across the kitchen table. With kan ya makan, on my mother's side of the family, stories have been passed down for many generations. My maternal grandmother, Mama Fortunée--whose Arabic name, Mas'ouda, meant the same good fortune as it did in French--said kan ya makan in America before launching into age-old Iraqi children's rhymes, such as that of the bald-headed Jew bullied in the souq, or the beetle who wore makeup and red lipstick. So, too, did her great-grandmother before her--Jummah, a woman so ancient that it was said she needed three able-bodied men to help her walk across a room. On winter nights in Baghdad, Jummah would summon her great-grandchildren into a large bed heated by a charcoal brazier under the covers to tell them stories of mischief and great adventure in the cradle of civilization. The terrifying legend of the jinni that haunted the courtyard mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath; the epics of Abu Zayd al-Hilali, whose exploits of war and conquest as a tribal leader in the Arabian desert made him a legendary hero of the pre-Islamic era. Jummah also told the story of her very own husband, Eliahou Rouben, one of the wealthiest Jewish merchants in Baghdad. My ancestor began his career as a peddler who carried a sack over his shoulder and fended off thieves in the city streets. Eventually Eliahou Rouben built a trading empire--caravans of a thousand camels that plied the Silk Road--and would proudly display his battle scars from the early days as a measure of how far he'd come. But Eliahou Rouben's only son, from a prior marriage, was deemed unworthy of his father's wealthy inheritance for he had been born with six fingers on one hand. The legal battle that ensued after Eliahou Rouben's death exhausted the family fortune, forcing them to start anew, as they had had to do many times before. The act of telling these stories from one generation to the next helped to reinforce the idea that we were part of something larger than ourselves: that we had an identity that was worth preserving. Even though no one lived in Iraq anymore, we were still Iraqi Jews. We knew why we ululated at bar mitzvahs and why we hung amulets with garlic around newborns to ward off the evil eye. We knew why, at the end of Passover, we hit each other with green branches to usher in a new and bountiful spring. We knew why we spoke Arabic--though here I use the proverbial "we," because, truth be told, for a long time kan ya makan were just about the only words in Arabic I knew. Excerpted from Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story by Jordan Salama All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.