---
product_id: 39614394
title: "The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria Hardcover – February 28, 2017"
brand: "alia malek"
price: "€ 26.83"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 6
url: https://www.desertcart.ie/products/39614394-the-home-that-was-our-country-a-memoir-of-syria
store_origin: IE
region: Ireland
---

# The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria Hardcover – February 28, 2017

**Brand:** alia malek
**Price:** € 26.83
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria Hardcover – February 28, 2017 by alia malek
- **How much does it cost?** € 26.83 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ie](https://www.desertcart.ie/products/39614394-the-home-that-was-our-country-a-memoir-of-syria)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    The Syria That Was
  

*by A***K on Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2017*

Alia Malek, using the reconstruction of her grandmother’s home as a framework, offers an introduction to Syria, not only its political history but also its social organization.  The reader marvels along with the author at her reacquaintance with an enormous extended family.  One feels like a bystander reading vivid evocations of a social network embracing neighbors of differing faiths.  And one feels outrage at the deliberate destruction of such a caring community.  Malek’s peculiar blend of citizenships has allowed her both the intimacy of access and the perspective of detachment.  This is a beautiful book.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Required reading if you're going to say a word about Syria -- or even if you're not.
  

*by K***R on Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2017*

There's so much more to Syria than its conflicts: I think this book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand that. Period.Malek's book begins by narrating the country's birth, first through the story of her larger-than-life great-grandfather and mother. (I foresee a movie adaptation,  beginning with Marta building ovens to feed the poor). We get to know her grandmother's Damascus apartment block, where Malek herself lived in 2012. In the opening chapters, history I'd thought I knew felt reframed, and coloured by these characters. She makes abstract-seeming personas tangible, even the founder of Baath and rival Islamic and secular factions becoming personalities. The book's pace quickens with Malek's first visit to Syria in 1992, and reels you into its novelistic-feeling narrative. I'd meant to read it slowly, but could barely put it down.If you're as suspicious of memoirs as I am, rest assured that Malek's book is one of the the exceptions (it reminded me of Isabel Allende's PAULA, Karol Nielsen's BLACK ELEPHANTS, or Dexter Filkins' THE FOREVER WAR). Malek keeps  the focus tight; she leaves out  much of her life when not in Syria. We only learn about Salma's granddaughter, and we grow to love her cousins and her home. The vivid descriptions made me miss the Syria I will now never  know, from multi-religious Damascus to "Aleppo's great restaurants" (a phrase I never thought I'd read). Losses that preceded her story are just as vivid: the loss of Damascus' once-thriving Jewish Quarter, brought me to tears.This book doesn't just belong on your shelf. It belongs in your heart.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A candidate for best non-fiction book of 2017.
  

*by D***S on Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2017*

This is an intellectually and emotionally exhausting read.Alia Malek is the child of Syrian Christians who emigrated to America while the mother was pregnant with their first child - her. She set out to write a biography of her grandmother Salma, and this book is the result.Much of the book's first third is, indeed, a biography of Salma. She was a strong woman in a place and times where strong women had limits put on them (not to say that there are no other such places and times...), and expressed her strength in ways consistent with those limits, while chafing at them. Malek paints her ancestors with a broad-ish brush, but, as Van Gogh proved, a broad brush can be very expressive indeed.The book's second part, and shortest, covers with an even broader brush the time from Salma's death in 1982, to Alia Malek's own move to Damascus in April of 2011. Her intentions in moving there were, first, to renovate and live in Salma's "house" (actually an apartment she owned a building called the Tahaan), and second, to research her family's history, and especially Salma's.Part three, about half the book, covers the time from her moving to Damascus, to her final(?) departure in May of 2013. Some of it is indeed about her researches. Some is about being an American (of Syrian descent) in Syria - and in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Armenia - during those first years of the "Arab Spring," as conditions in Syria went from _scary_ to _hellish_. And some - starting from part one, really - is about the development and decay of Syria as an independent country.Modern Syria is a dismantled subset of the "greater Syria," _Bilad al-Sham_, which was dismantled and redistricted by the French and English during the "Mandates." (Most of modern Israel is in "historic Syria," and of course the Golan Heights are conquered Syrian territory.) Stating this baldly is not an argument against (or for) the right of the modern Israeli nation-state to exist; but every fact about the historical situation helps to understand what it is today.After modern Syria was "granted" "independence" in the aftermath of WWII, governments came and went like the changing of underwear, usually as dirty - and usually by coup. The rise of Hafez al-Assad in 1971 was a relief to many Syrians: he brought a kind of stability, and he was not (much) worse than the governments who had preceeded him. A Ba'athist, he at first attempted a kind of socialist reform (all the while protecting his own rule), then, when the government went broke, turned to a sort of state capitalism where a business needed a "partner" in the Assad inner circles.Bashar al-Assad was not meant to succeed his father; he studied to be an optometrist. But his older brother died in a car crash, and Bashar was quickly groomed to replace him. For whatever reason, he proved to be a more paranoid and tyrannical ruler - sorry, "President" - than his father ever was (and he was no slouch in the tyrannical department).Malek paints the ongoing crisis/civil war/disintegration of Syria in terms that make it very clear that at least in her view - Bashar is crazy like a fox, that every act of the government is carried out with the clear-eyed purpose of not only keeping Bashar al-Assad in power, but keeping the government blameless in the crisis, painting itself as heroically keeping Syria together while "terrorists" and "foreign agitators" are to blame for all the violence. As of 2013, Malek makes clear, there were still a significant population of Damascenes who either believed it or pretended to.Meanwhile: Alia Malek, and her father, successfully redeemed Salma's house from people who were for all purposes legally squatting, restored it, and lived in it (though her father could only stay a day before returning to America). Malek spent a little over two years mostly in Damascus, under at least some suspicion by the _mukhabarat_ (secret police) of being a spy. People she knew were "taken," some permanently, some for shorter "stays." She gathered information, not only about Syria (some of which she, a journalist, published), but about her family, its history, its friends, and so on; and finally left when pressure from her family and friends - whom her presence might endanger - led her to do so, returning to America for the launch of Al Jazeera America.Malek writes well, clearly, and with passion. Her story, or stories, are emotionally wrenching at times.Pray for the people of Syria.

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*Last updated: 2026-03-13*