Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland


Book Description

A stunningly written epic novel of by one of Ireland's finest living writers.




Cries for a Lost Homeland


Book Description

Guli Francis-Dehqani was born in Isfahan, Iran, to a family who were part of the tiny Anglican Church established by 19th century missionaries. Her father, a Muslim convert, became the first indigenous Persian bishop. As the Islamic Revolution of 1979 swept across the country, church properties were raided, confiscated or closed down. Guli’s father was briefly imprisoned before surviving an attack on his life, which injured his wife. Soon after, whilst he was out of the country for meetings, Guli’s 24 year-old brother, Bahram, a university teacher in Tehran, was murdered. No one was ever brought to justice and the family were advised to leave Iran. Guli was 14. They eventually settled in England with refugee status. Drawing on the riches of Persian culture and her own dramatic experience of loss of a homeland, Guli offers memorable and perceptive reflections on Jesus’ seven final sayings from the cross, opening up for Western readers fresh and arresting insights from a Middle Eastern perspective.




Fragments of a Lost Homeland


Book Description

The Armenian world was shattered by the 1915 genocide. Not only were thousands of lives lost but families were displaced and the narrative threads that connected them to their own past and homelands were forever severed. Many have been left with only fragments of their family histories: a story of survival passed on by a grandparent who made it through the cataclysm or, if lucky, an old photograph of a distant, silent, ancestor. By contrast the Dildilian family chose to speak. Two generations gave voice to their experience in lengthy written memoirs, in diaries and letters, and most unusually in photographs and drawings. Their descendant Armen T. Marsoobian uses all these resources to tell their story and, in doing so, brings to life the pivotal and often violent moments in Armenian and Ottoman history from the massacres of the late nineteenth century to the final expulsions in the 1920s during the Turkish War of Independence. Unlike most Armenians, the Dildilians were allowed to convert to Islam and stayed behind while their friends, colleagues and other family members perished in the death marches of 1915-1916.Their remarkable story is one of survival against the overwhelming odds and survival in the face of peril.




Egypt - The Lost Homeland: Exodus from Egypt, 1947-1967


Book Description

In the twentieth century, the political Zionist movement and Egyptian rulers completely uprooted the country's thriving Jewish community - a goal the Pharaohs tried to realize as early as 3500 years ago. Mostly comprised of descendants of Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula, the world's oldest Jewish community totaled 85,000 members in 1948. No more than 100 to 200 Jews live in Egypt today. This book tells the story of Egypt's Jewish history from Biblical times to 1967, the year of one of the last major Jewish emigration waves from Egypt. It highlights the First Exodus in ca. 1500 BCE and the Second Exodus, which was triggered by the foundation of the State of Israel and three successive wars in 1948, 1956, and 1967. Throughout the narrative, it becomes evident that the Jewish community consistently was subject to the arbitrary will of Egyptian rulers. Starting in 1948, members of this community were forced to leave the country without any of their belongings on short notice. Like other Jews from the Arab world, Egyptian Jews were not Zionists in the Eurocentric, Ashkenazi sense. Their arrival in Israel was met with prejudice and disdain. Even though they were discriminated against in matters of housing and education, they still managed to integrate well into Israeli society and are now members of the country's upper and middle class. The evidence presented in this book is based on interviews with ninety-six Egyptian Jews in Israel and the United States.




Imaginary Homelands


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“Read every page of this book; better still, re-read them. The invocation means no hardship, since every true reader must surely be captivated by Rushdie’s masterful invention and ease, the flow of wit and insight and passion. How literature of the highest order can serve the interests of our common humanity is freshly illustrated here: a defence of his past, a promise for the future, and a surrender to nobody or nothing whatever except his own all-powerful imagination.”-Michael Foot, Observer Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects –the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression. For this paperback edition, the author has written a new essay to mark the third anniversary of the fatwa.




Lost in a Homeland


Book Description

'Lost in a Homeland' is a sequel to 'A Token of Love' and recounts the difficulties Amy and George experience when they return to 1930's England, after their farming venture in the Canadian prairies. Set in leafy Buckinghamshire and the East End of London, the plight of those without work at a time of the Great Depression as well as the lifestyle of the wealthy is explored. George's search for employment as well as a family home is tough. Will these challenges be too much for their marriage to survive?




The Wolf of Baghdad


Book Description

'Enthralling and moving. It is magical.'— Claudia Roden In the 1940s a third of Baghdad's population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or had escaped. This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited. Transported by the power of music to her ancestral home in the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, the author encounters its ghost-like inhabitants who are revealed as long-gone family members. As she explores the city, journeying through their memories and her imagination, she at first sees successful integration, and cultural and social cohesion. Then the mood turns darker with the fading of this ancient community's fortunes. This beautiful wordless narrative is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and of the making of this work. Says Isaacs: 'The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been to. I've been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family's roots.'




Homelands


Book Description

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? In Homelands, Nadav G. Shelef develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, he argues, driven by domestic political competition and help explain the variation in whether partitions resolve conflict. Homelands also provides systematic, comparable data about the homeland status of lost territory over time that allow it to bridge the persistent gap between constructivist theories of nationalism and positivist empirical analyses of international relations.




Homeland Elegies


Book Description

A "profound and provocative" new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish: an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.




The Lost Homeland


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