Daughters of Palestine: A Memoir in Five Generations

Episcopal priest King debuts with a bracing account of her family’s flight from violence as Palestinian Christian refugees. The history is told from the perspectives of three women: Aniiseh, King’s great-grandmother; Bahi, the author’s grandmother; and the author herself. Aniiseh grew up near Haifa (in what’s now Israel) in the 1920s, married at 15, and miscarried three times before giving birth to seven daughters and one son. Bahi’s family fled anti-Palestinian violence when Israel became a nation state in 1948, settled in Syria and then Lebanon (where the family contended with anti-Christian animosity), and—when the country erupted into civil war in 1975–left for the United States. King, who passed as white while growing up in Houston, Tex., had only an oblique understanding of her Palestinian heritage, until she set out as a teen to understand her roots and her family’s place in America (“I always experienced the world with the privilege that whiteness brings... [but] our whiteness is limited, liminal”). King pulls no punches in detailing how seemingly safe harbors for refugees can suddenly become threatening, and vividly captures how her family celebrated life’s blessings and endured tumult with the aid of their faith. The result is a powerful narrative of loss, survival, and belief. (July)