Individual first-hand stories, a journalistic approach to research, approachable literary style. I am passionate about this genre to the point of finding it unthinkable that anyone could read a book like Pearlman's and not be moved. To me, it's the most engaging, and so the most memorable way to connect with a wide audience about an important moment in history. Intimately personal stories such as these bridge the chasm of empathy between the people caught up in the tragedy of the stories and the people who couldn't have imagined them.
Wendy Pearlman is an academic specializing in comparative politics in the Middle East, but We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is no poli-sci lecture. In this carefully assembled collection of personal narratives about the Syrian civil war, Pearlman first brings us up to speed with a quick history lesson on Syria and some context for any readers who are unfamiliar with the origins of its nightmarish civil war, then passes the mic to Syrians who lived through it, many of them active participants in the call for revolution. The short narratives, ranging from one sentence to a few pages, are arranged by subject matter to recreate the arc of the Syrian drama. Pearlman's story-arc framework for the book taught me much I didn't know I didn't know about Syria's recent history and the stifling fear that Syrians had known as normal for so long before the Arab spring gave some of them hope for a better way of life.
This is Syria's story and is best and most accurately told by Syrians, a point that Prof. Pearlman, an expert on social movements and conflict in the Middle East, obviously understands, judging by her choice of genre for this book. Reading We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is like having a conversation with a hundred friends from Syria, but friends who have endured multiple lifetimes worth of heartache. As Talia, a TV correspondent from Aleppo eloquently said it, "...every Syrian has a hundred stories in his heart. Every Syrian himself is a story." Though everyone interviewed in the book was pro-revolution, the beauty of this multi-narrative method is that no one has the same thing to say about it, and by putting all of their accounts together we're able to view a much more complex tableau of this ongoing history. The level of granularity the genre offers - down to the individual's grief, hope, loss, is essential to our ability to empathize in a situation of this magnitude. Numbers like Syria's - 500,000 dead, 5.6 million refugees, 13 million in need inside the country - we call them staggering, but they don't make us stagger. It's too much to understand at a personal level. But by reading first-hand accounts like those found here we're forced to connect with the personal tolls of the war, the push to pause and truly consider the state in which Syrians now find themselves, what we might do in the same situation, our country's part (and even our own) in the global farce, and how it all comes down to chance that it was them and not us, etc. We need these stories.
I should say this book is also an incredible inspiration to me because I am working on a project in much this same vein. If I ever had any doubts as to the necessity the kind of work I'm producing, Pearlman has effectively quieted them with her essential work. I feel very lucky to have come across this book when I did. She has obviously devoted immense effort in to creating this anthology, pulled from dozens, if not hundreds, of interviews that all required translation and transcription, and I hope she is very proud of what she has accomplished here.
I hope you will read this important book (perhaps not in public, if you don't like people to see you cry). Here are other books from this special genre, which I hope will become as close to your heart as it is to mine:
Remnants of a Separation by Aanchal Malhotra on the upheaval of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, with stories prompted through questions about personal belongings that made the great journey with the story-tellers. Among many other accolades, it was short-listed for the British Academy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding; and
Anything by Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel laureate and mother of the genre, whose work centers on the untold stories, mainly women's, from the former Soviet Union. Her Nobel was awarded for Voices from Chernobyl, which was also the one that left me in awe of its power and validated my first inkling of an idea for my current work in progress, back in 2015. I also can't recommend highly enough War's Unwomanly Face and Zinky Boys.
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