STRANGER IN THE DESERT

A South American journey explores the persistence of memory.

Salama went to Argentina in search of old stories but wound up writing a new one. Leaving his native New York to follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, a yarn-spinning wandering salesman, the author discovered that reconnecting with his living South American relatives was more rewarding than chasing a phantom. Salama’s follow-up to his exceptional literary debut, Every Day the River Changes, is more tightly focused, personal, and intimate. Traveling from Buenos Aires to the foot of the Andes to the Bolivian border, he finds none of the elusive “Lost Salamas” he’s hoped to meet. Instead, he locates a deeper, enriched identity. His meld of Syrian, Iraqi, and Argentine heritage had always intrigued him, provoking lingering questions. But it was the odyssey begun by uncovering his paternal grandfather’s cache of family histories that propelled his project, and he augmented his adventures with years of digital conversations with family members across the world. “Stories,” he writes, “are currency for survival in a world where we are perpetually faced with the prospect of our demise….The stories we leave behind will form the mark of an existence.” Like his first book, Salama blends travelogue with historical perspective and journalism, but he probes his subject from the outside as well as the inside. He grapples with the legacy of Arab Jews who fled the failing Ottoman Empire for new lives abroad, sustaining their cultural distinctiveness while integrating into their adopted homes, and notes how he gained greater appreciation for his ancestors. The narrative is not quite as riveting as the author’s debut, nor does it possess the same power to transform our view of a country and its people. Nonetheless, Salama’s rapport with readers remains unquestioned.

An accomplished sophomore effort from an unusually gifted young writer.