Syrian Women Refugees: Personal Accounts of Transition Paperback – Import, 4 March 2019

Humanitarian, very well written biography of nine refugee women. Some of the women share the realities about war and their experiences but there are no horror stories that makes you clinch and yet the book helped me have empathy for the women who survived what we cannot even imagine going through in North America or Europe. There is a stigma in Canada and many other countries that the refugees are a burden. The author breaks these stigmas by reflecting the true personalities of the mentioned refugee women and expresses how educated, determined and talented they are, which proves that they are great assets to our society.

This book gives the reader a heartbreaking, insightful, and moving look into the lives of Syrian women refugees. It's finely-wrought and full of subtle observations about the changing circumstances through which each woman navigates her life and the web of relations (both fragile and enduring) that sustains her. Ezer brings her own relationships with each of the women into her writing and--as part of an ethical, feminist stance--refuses to focus on the sensational or to write about other women's lives in a way that makes them anthropological subjects. She also does not overdo anthropological self-reflexivity as a means of compensating for the act of turning another person's life into a subject of study. Instead, her own deep connection with her subjects comes through with grace, warmth, and deep perceptiveness. The stories in this book are filled with great, unfathomable loss, but also with quiet moments of resilience and everyday survival. This book would be ideal for classes on the Middle East, because it gives human faces to statistics and restores a sense of the everyday back to what are otherwise sensationalized stories from a part of the world seen as distant and dangerous. Ezer's balancing of the specificity of individual circumstances with the universality of human experience is rich and poignant.