I just finished reading Stephanie Saldana's memoir, A Country Between: Making a Home Where Both Sides of Jerusalem Collide---the follow-up to her 2010 memoir, The Bread of Angels. Beautiful. Poetic. Gentle. Life-affirming. Honest. Introspective. Poignant. Stephanie and I were students at Harvard Divinity School together. When she left for Damascus on a Fulbright, she thought that she was documenting Syria's proximity as a bordering country to the Iraq war. Never did she realize that she was actually documenting a Damascus on the cusp of war within its own city walls, a Syria that no longer exists after the tragic death and diaspora of so many people she met while studying, praying, and falling in love in this ancient country.
A Country Between has stuck with me in many of the same ways that her first memoir has remained in my memory. Stephanie's descriptions of motherhood; of the liminal spaces between peoples, cultures, religions, and nations; of life in Jerusalem; of generational inheritances; of memories of people and places now vanished and destroyed; of love and marriage and children and violence and war and peace and pianos...all beautiful and profound in the domestic reality of life. As a follow-up, Stephanie now hosts Mosaic Stories, a project dedicated to preserving the cultural artifacts of a Syria in refuge, tragically dispersed around the globe.
