M. Dressler's Reviews > American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience

American Refuge, part memoir, part cultural reckoning, and above all a soaring, searing chorus of voices speaking to us from the depths of the trauma and the resilience of the refugee experience, is both more beautiful and more necessary than any other book I can imagine on its subject. Abdo, whether she is recounting her own family’s history of forced migration from Palestine or translating, with deepest respect and sympathy, the stories of those she has worked with in her own career as a writer and activist on behalf of the forcibly displaced—tales of the profundity of homes lost, of feet torn from beloved carpets and doorsteps, of unbearable yet somehow borne journeys—presents her subjects with a clarity, poetry and force that is impossible to ignore. Refugees arriving in America, she reminds us, are “separated from their souls,” survivors of war, persecution, terror and despair, stripped of all but their lives, “tightened for travel,” deserving not only of sympathy and shelter but of our acutest understanding (too often, she makes plain, we imagine refugees arriving on our shores as having found “happiness” or “peace” at last—when in reality the heart-pain of what they have been forced to flee is deep and lasting). Abdo makes achingly visible the vibrancy of what was lost, the cultures, family structures and traditions, schooling, professions, hopes and dreams left behind, in language that is rich and remarkable for its power and insistence yet never takes the spotlight from the lives and crossroads it illuminates. American Refuge is stunning, a complex, lucid, and deeply moving symphony of voices, a weave of histories and a web of urgent discussions about what more we can do to help souls like our own—“anyone,” Abdo reminds us pointedly, “can become a refugee”—find not peace, perhaps, but futurity, the next door. It is a song, a lesson, a call to action on behalf of those who have always been our neighbors, and it has permanently changed the way I see the world.