From Jerusalem to a Kingdom by the Sea
Adel Dajani
Zuleika: 2021
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Strangers on a Pier: Portrait of a Family
Tash Aw
Fourth Estate: 2021
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After finishing an epic journey in search of my family history in the Middle East, I was expecting to feel a sense of accomplishment and, to use that strangely clinical term, closure. Instead, I have been gripped by a prolonged and deepening sense of loss and longing.

My Italian and Greek forebears left inhospitable European shores in the mid-nineteenth century for the comparative security of Ottoman lands. The Italian Jews on my mother’s side were unsure of their place in the emerging unified Italian kingdom; my father’s Greek antecedents fought the Turks, as fireship captains, sailing their sturdy three-masted barques up against Ottoman men-of-war and setting them alight. They won their independence in the 1830s, but lost their economic livelihoods. Arriving in the Levant, they found good jobs and blended easily with the diverse elements of late Ottoman society, with its protection of minorities and demand for European skills. Along the way, they married into the Arab community and put down roots. They also enjoyed protective liaisons with the intrusive new British imperial establishment, either through marriage or by serving the new imperial order.

• Tags: Adel Dajani, Israel, Issue 26, Libya, Malaysia, Michael Vatikiotis, Palestine, Tash Aw