THE ROAD FROM RAQQA

Syrian brothers take different paths of immigration, neither easy, in this thoughtful account.

The Middle East has experienced waves of violence for generations. One came in the 1980s, an early spasm of repression by the Assad regime, which sent Riyad Alkasem on a roundabout path to America. Riyad had studied law, but when he finally landed in Tennessee, he opened a restaurant serving Syrian food—one that proved so popular that, by the end of Ringer staff writer Conn’s account, Riyad is planning to open a second location. Meanwhile, his brother Bashar stayed in Syria, became a lawyer, and was on his way to a judgeship when civil war erupted and the brothers’ hometown, Raqqa, was seized by the Islamic State group (aka Daesh). “Bashar saw the world as a place filled with the wonders of God’s creation,” writes Conn. “Daesh saw it only as a place full of things to burn.” Riyad’s earlier course had led to American citizenship, and he became an ideal immigrant: a hard worker and business owner who contributed strongly to his community. But after 9/11, he was rewarded with one episode of bigoted reaction after another. Bashar’s path turned instead to Germany, for in Trump-era America, no Syrians—no Muslims, for that matter—need apply. For Riyad, “Trump emboldened the worst of America,” while for Bashar, “Germany is what Riyad has long believed the United States to be: the kind of place Ronald Reagan once called the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ ” Conn’s affecting narrative touches deeply not just on these contrasting immigration issues, with the strong implication that Germany’s gain is America’s loss, but also on how the bonds of family and old community can exist even when people are uprooted. As such, it makes a solid complement to Khaled Khalifa’s novel Death Is Hard Work (2019) as a study in how people persist and prevail in a time of terror.

A convincing counterargument to anti-immigrant sentiment.