Stranger in the Desert

Description

Inspired by family lore, a young writer embarks on an epic quest through the Argentine Andes in search of a heritage spanning hemispheres and centuries, from the Jewish Levant to turn-of-the-century trade routes in South America

One Thanksgiving afternoon at his grandparents’ house, Jordan Salama discovers a large binder stuffed with yellowing papers and old photographs—a five-hundred-year wandering history of his Arab-Jewish family, from Moorish Spain to Ottoman Syria to Argentina and beyond.

One story in particular captures his attention: that of his great-grandfather, a Syrian-born, Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrant to Argentina who in the 1920s worked as a traveling salesman in the Andes—and may have left behind forgotten descendants along the way. Encouraged by his grandfather, Jordan goes in search of these “Lost Salamas,” traveling more than a thousand miles up the spine of South America’s greatest mountain range.

Combining travelog, history, memoir, and reportage, Stranger in the Desert transports readers from the lonely plains of Patagonia to the breathtaking altiplano of the high Andes; from the old Jewish quarter of Damascus to today’s vibrant neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. It is also a fervent journey of self-discovery as Salama grapples with his own Jewish, Arab, and Latin American identities, interrogating the stories families tell themselves, and to what end.Town and Country, A Must Read Book for 2024
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“A nonchronological personal narrative rather than a standard travel memoir, Stranger in the Desert is a reflection on family history, identity, and storytelling.” —Laura Chanoux, Booklist

“Readers will be left musing on their own family histories, perhaps wondering what they might discover if they were to follow a loose thread or two.” —Shelf Awareness

“Salama’s rapport with readers remains unquestioned. An accomplished sophomore effort from an unusually gifted young writer.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Stranger in the Desert is a beautiful, soulful story ranging across continents and languages, topographies and etymologies, time and space. Through a pastiche of maps, diaries, and archival materials, Jordan Salama attempts to piece together a lost family history, and the result is both delightfully idiosyncratic yet somehow still universal, revealing a great deal about the elusive concepts of identity and home, and what it means to find one’s place in the world by following one’s roots.” —Jennifer Senior, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author

“Salama has a precocious curiosity about his family’s past and a journalist’s determination to hit the road in search of it. His book is at once a young man’s quest for identity and a travelogue that tenderly evokes the sights, sounds, and stories of his ancestors’ worlds.” —Ariel Sabar, author of My Father’s ParadiseJORDAN SALAMA is a writer covering culture and the environment in the Americas. He is the author of Every Day the River Changes, a journey down Colombia’s Río Magdalena, which was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2021. His essays and stories have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Scientific American, NPR’s All Things Considered and other publications. Most recently, his story “The Candy Sellers,” an investigation into the lives of migrant families selling candy on the NYC subway, was on the cover of New York magazine. He lives in New York.“Kan ya makan…” It happened, or it didn’t happen; it was so, or it wasn’t so. The Arabic phrase for “once upon a time” always means a story is coming. What follows can be as grand as a tale from One Thousand and One Nights—the legendary Middle Eastern collection of fables in which the vizier’s daughter Scheherazade tells stories in order to save herself from being killed—or as ordinary as a family legend told across the kitchen table.

With kan ya makan, on my mother’s side of the family, stories have been passed down for many generations. My maternal grandmother, Mama Fortunée—whose Arabic name, Mas’ouda, meant the same good fortune as it did in French—said kan ya makan in America before launching into age-old Iraqi children’s rhymes, such as that of the bald-headed Jew bullied in the souq, or the beetle who wore makeup and red lipstick. So, too, did her great-grandmother before her—Jummah, a woman so ancient that it was said she needed three able-bodied men to help her walk across a room. On winter nights in Baghdad, Jummah would summon her great-grandchildren into a large bed heated by a charcoal brazier under the covers to tell them stories of mischief and great adventure in the cradle of civilization. The terrifying legend of the jinni that haunted the courtyard mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath; the epics of Abu Zayd al-Hilali, whose exploits of war and conquest as a tribal leader in the Arabian desert made him a legendary hero of the pre-Islamic era. Jummah also told the story of her very own husband, Eliahou Rouben, one of the wealthiest Jewish merchants in Baghdad. My ancestor began his career as a peddler who carried a sack over his shoulder and fended off thieves in the city streets. Eventually Eliahou Rouben built a trading empire—caravans of a thousand camels that plied the Silk Road—and would proudly display his battle scars from the early days as a measure of how far he’d come. But Eliahou Rouben’s only son, from a prior marriage, was deemed unworthy of his father’s wealthy inheritance for he had been born with six fingers on one hand. The legal battle that ensued after Eliahou Rouben’s death exhausted the family fortune, forcing them to start anew, as they had had to do many times before.

The act of telling these stories from one generation to the next helped to reinforce the idea that we were part of something larger than ourselves: that we had an identity that was worth preserving. Even though no one lived in Iraq anymore, we were still Iraqi Jews. We knew why we ululated at bar mitzvahs and why we hung amulets with garlic around newborns to ward off the evil eye. We knew why, at the end of Passover, we hit each other with green branches to usher in a new and bountiful spring. We knew why we spoke Arabic—though here I use the proverbial “we,” because, truth be told, for a long time kan ya makan were just about the only words in Arabic I knew.US

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