My Road from Damascus: A Memoir

With achingly beautiful prose, this memoir by a Syrian dissident activist and author now living in Canada powerfully interlaces brutal descriptions of imprisonment with nostalgic stories of a happy childhood in rural Syria. In college, Saeed’s antigovernment writing and participation in political meetings led to three jailings for a total of 12 years, with no due process or formal charges from the oppressive Syrian regime. His matter-of-fact, sometimes detached, accounting of the torture he and other political prisoners endured is nearly unbearable to hear, but his descriptions of how the prisoners (and sometimes the guards) helped one another provide welcome moments of grace. The memoir is not without humor, either, especially in Saeed’s childhood reminiscences, which include climbing under a fence to play doctor with the girl next door and smearing coffee grounds on his upper lip because God ignored his prayers for a mustache. Narrator Pasha Ebrahimi expertly navigates the shifting tones of the very short chapters and delivers the harrowing and heartwarming details with equal care.