Amra Sabic-El-Rayess’ memoir, The Cat I Never Named:A True Story of Love, War, and Survival, written with Laura L. Sullivan (Bloomsbury, Sept. 8), shares her experiences as a Bosnian Muslim during the Serbian genocide of the 1990s, when her family was adopted by Maci (cat in Bosnian), a calico whose unconditional love changed their lives. Now a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York, Sabic-El-Rayess researches the role of education in perpetuating inequalities and in healing after societal collapse. We met over Zoom to discuss her YA debut; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your story will speak to many people for such different reasons.

It is a complicated book—it captures four years of living under military siege with limited access to food, no electricity, no normal schooling—and my ultimate arrival in the U.S. as a student on a full scholarship with broken English. I take the reader through a range of emotions, from complete exhilaration with the most ordinary things to devastation. The most difficult moments come when I am reminded that I am viscerally hated for simply being a Bosnian Muslim. I come close to being killed and almost being raped by a Serb soldier. Then there is a surprise, where the beauty comes in, where I find ways [to] build resilience. That didn’t happen on my own [but] with the love of those around me, family and friends, even my first crush, [as well as] the love of education and this immense desire to survive.

There is a third layer to the book that is almost unbelievable; there is magic to it. I encounter unconditional love in the form of Maci. People are escaping into [her home city of] Bihać, and I’ll never know, but I believe her family was lost or killed. Maci attaches herself to me and my family. To be honest, I did not want a cat; I was afraid of everything with claws—I was attacked by my uncle’s German shepherd when I was 5 or 6 years old. My parents didn’t want a pet: The war is about to begin. Will we have enough food for ourselves? How are we going to take in another living being? So, we did not want her, but she didn’t care! Maci in fact, saves my brother’s and my lives on the very first day of the war. Because of Maci we are saved, but four of our friends are blown up. She represents the symbolism [of] how in life, at times we reject certain individuals [or] ideas, but they become our saviors and, in Maci’s case, a guiding light throughout the war for my family.

Why write this story for teens—and why now?

I was 16 when the war started and 21 when it ended. Those should have been beautiful years. I felt that the only way I could truly write the story was to write it for teens. Often when we talk about racism and genocide, we think of the Holocaust. I wanted to remind young adults—who maybe have felt that’s the distant past and will not repeat itself—that it can happen now. It happened to me, and it can happen to anyone. I want [American kids] to learn from that experience and create a better world.

I’ve always thought it’s important, but I have so much other work, and eventually I’ll get to it. Then I started to see contours of hate and violence that I had seen before, and it scared me. My younger daughter came to me—she was 10 at the time—and said, “Mommy, if you and Daddy are rounded up as immigrants or as Muslims, and you leave [my] sister and me, will we live alone?” That woke me up. That made me feel I was abdicating my responsibilities as an immigrant, genocide survivor, mother, educator, [and] academic to [show] how far humanity can go if we opt for hatred.

What do you hope readers will learn from your book?

My greatest hope would be that they forget that they’re reading about a Bosnian Muslim woman and that they begin to see aspects of my life as their own and begin to identify with my pain and suffering and the racism I experienced. If they [haven’t had] those experiences, I hope that they recognize those in their communities [who have]. My fundamental belief is that once we humanize the other, the hated, the marginalized, the excluded, we start to see them in us and us in them.

You excelled in school, and now you teach the next generation of educators. What informs your work?

Education is a political tool, a mechanism often used by elites to pursue and propagate narratives that work to their advantage. Education is not always benign. We have diversity in classrooms, however we have not ended racism and biases. We need to change how we teach kids. In the U.S., more than 50% of children are non-White. How do we account for their perspectives, feelings, and histories? I’m not sure teachers are prepared for that.

The second issue is what is being taught. That’s where The Cat I Never Named comes into play: [It] allows teachers to explore marginalization, discrimination, resilience, and motivation. The third area is who gets the privilege of teaching, [including the] professors who are teaching teachers. Unless we diversify faculty in graduate schools of education, we’re not going to diversify the narratives and knowledge that are shared with teachers who [enter] classrooms. [In my book] I talk about being discriminated against in the former Yugoslavia’s educational system. Even though I was one of the top students, I never read a story that had a Muslim girl as a heroine or a Muslim individual who was smart or funny. Through my teachers’ behavior—those who discriminated against me—and through the overall curriculum, I was delivered the message that I was lesser, and that made me feel ashamed of my identity.

Your book unfortunately holds such relevance to current events.

Those who have read the book are seeing parallels between what happened in Bosnia and what is happening in the U.S. Serb nationalists who justify genocide against the Bosnian Muslims often say that it had to be done because they’re protecting White Christian Europe, and therefore protecting European culture from infiltration and impurity. If you take that argument and slightly adjust the labels for the actors, you get the narrative of White supremacy and the far-right movement in the U.S. My hope is that my book serves as a warning, because once we go off that cliff, it is a journey with no return ticket.

Living with the label of being Muslim and being attacked for it is something that I have grown up with, even [experiencing the] Islamophobia that’s prevalent in the U.S. But I refuse to be silenced. This book is not only for all those reasons we already discussed, but also [for] friends and family who were killed or raped and who will never tell their stories. I sincerely hope we will never allow hate to spell out our future in the United States of America.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.