The Home That Was Our Country ─ A Memoir of Syria

In The Home that Was My Country, Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek chronicles her return to her family home in Damascus and the history of the Jabban apartment building. Here, generations of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Armenians lived, worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters.

In telling the story of her family over the course of the last century, Alia brings to light the triumphs and failures that have led Syria to where it is today. Her book bristles with insights, as Alia weaves acute political analysis into intimate scenes, interlacing the personal and the political with subtlety and grace. After being in and out of Syria growing up, Alia came back to Syria as a journalist at the time of the Arab Spring, striving to understand it as the country was beginning to disintegrate. As days go on, Alia learns how to speak the language that exists in a dictatorship, while privately confronting her own fears about her country's future, and learns how to carry on with everyday life.

This intimate portrait of contemporary Syria will shed more light on its history, society, and politics than all of today’s war reporting accounts written from the Syrian front. It makes for an eye-opening, highly moving, and beautiful read, and finds the humanity behind the disastrous daily headlines.

Alia Malek is a senior staff writer at Al Jazeera America and a civil rights lawyer. Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, she began her career as a trial attorney at the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. After working in the legal field in the US, Lebanon, and the West Bank, Malek earned her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in,the New York Times, the Nation, Foreign Policy, Salon,Christian Science Monitor, the Columbia Journalism Review, Granta,Guernica, Jadaliyya, and McSweeney’s. Her reporting from Syria forThe New York Times won the Marie Colvin Award in 2013. She was the editor of the Voice of Witness bookPatriot Acts: Narrative of Post 9/11 Injustice, which was excerpted by many publications including theBoston Review and the Guardian and was praised widely, notably by Salon and Mother Jones. Beginning in January of next year she will be a Puffin Fellow at the Nation Institute.