WHAT WE REMEMBER WILL BE SAVED

A journalist and religion scholar who has traveled widely in the Middle East delivers poignant, humanizing stories of war refugees from Syria and Iraq.

In these stories, gleaned from travels in 2016 and 2017 in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan, and Greece, Saldaña, the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, uses the theme of what refugees in flight were able to carry with them—often only the clothes on their backs. On Aug. 6, 2014, the Islamic State group invaded an ancient Christian community in Qaraqosh, Iraq, and 44,000 Christians were forced to flee. In Amman, Jordan, where many relocated, the author met a woman named Hana, who described how she and the other women re-created their previous social world, in which the sewing of dresses was an important tradition. “So I learned that objects could speak or elicit a memory,” writes Saldaña. “And I learned that when the places you love begin to disappear, you begin to live in them all the time.” In Istanbul, she tracked down Hozan, a famous Kurdish buzuq player, and his musician friend Ferhad, both from al-Hasakeh, Syria, which was riven by that nation’s civil war. Saldaña also recounts the horrendous conditions in a refugee camp in Greece called Moria, which was designed for 2,300 people but, by 2017, housed more than 7,000. The author’s exploration of Moria is particularly heartbreaking, as she clearly portrays the awful plight of the refugees as well as the unwillingness of many Western countries to assist. Finally, Saldaña traveled to a convent in Germany where a group of Yazidi, “members of a small and highly persecuted religious minority from northern Iraq,” found shelter from the violence of IS. Throughout this compassionate book, the author demonstrates the resilience of refugees, who carry with them their precious languages, cultures, and memories.

Memorable personal stories that give much-needed depth and humanity to what are otherwise merely numbers.