Generations
(Dalaa Al-Aydi and her dad, Wisam, both native Damascenes now living in Lueneburg, Germany)
I was drawn to the story of Syrians settling in Europe for many reasons: the quiet drama of an uprooted middle class redefining itself in strange lands; the opportunity to learn a new culture; the exploration of identity politics in Europe; the desire to unpack the word “refugee” of its distancing stereotypes.
But I am also deeply moved by its classic immigrant narrative.
I’m an immigrant myself, born in Athens to Greek parents who moved to the American Dakotas when I was four. Though I grew into a true American Midwesterner, my parents remained emotionally, culturally and even, to some extent, linguistically adrift in the US.
That's also the case for many of the Syrian parents I've met in Germany and Sweden. In some cases, their children are, now, in effect, the heads of households in their new countries. Even Lulu, who is blind but speaks English well, translates for her 49-year old father, Saif, for official business in Fagersta, their new home in Sweden. (Lulu also translates for her cousin, Doua, who is still learning Swedish. Here's Lulu, left, and Doua, right, in Lulu's kitchen just before a breakfast last week).
I saw this shift most starkly in Germany, with the families of two brothers, Mwafak and Wisam Al-Aidy, (who are Lulu’s uncles).
In Syria, before the war, Mwafak and Wisam were the primary breadwinners and decision-makers in their households. They recalled working at their shops from morning until night. Now, as they struggle to learn German and find work in mid-life, they have ceded many of the household decisions to their children.
Mwafak and his wife Lina have four daughters who, after a year in Germany have learned German quite well. His oldest daughters, Toleen, 21, and Marleen, 20, accompany him on most of his errands. (Marleen helped him liaise with the Red Cross and local hospitals after her very ill aunt Manale arrived unexpectedly last month in Friedrichshafen, Germany from Turkey).
And in Wisam’s family - he and his wife Nesrine have four boys and a little girl - the de facto head of the household is the oldest son, Rafat, who is 21. Rafat speaks fluent English and decent German, so he deals with everything - hospitals, social services, banks, schools, shopping. (Here he is on the right, pictured with his brother, Naif, earlier this year in a photo by my colleague on this project, Holly Pickett.)
Rafat has three mobile phones that constantly ring. “I’m going to start charging my parents ten euros an hour for my services,” he said last month, the day after his family took a long, cross country train journey from a refugee camp in Lahr (in the southwestern German state of Baden Wurttemburg) to their new home in Lueneberg, a small city near Hamburg in the northwestern state of Lower Saxony).
Rafat was joking, but he was also exhausted: in the previous five days, he had rushed at the last minute by train from Lahr to Friedrichshafen to meet his aunt Manale, who arrived unexpectedly at the airport there, stricken with advanced cancer; planned his family’s cross country move via the cheapest Deutsche Bahn tickets; lugged three giant bags of clothes on multiple changes during that 12-hour-trip, while directing his family members to the proper train gates; translated several documents from social services; translated for his parents as they shopped for furniture for their new home; and also translated for me as I interviewed his parents.
Later, as we shared a Twix, his favorite candy, he yawned and sighed. “I hope my parents and my brothers learn to be self-sufficient because I have to move on at some point and plan my own future,” he said. He studied economics in Damascus but now wants to switch to medicine at a university in Germany.
As Rafat talked, his sister Dalaa, who is almost four years old, climbed on to his lap as he sat at the bus stop after the family had stopped at Poco, a discount, do-it-yourself furniture store that's kind of like IKEA. Dalaa is unbearably adorable: she’s smart, funny, fearless and speaks a high-pitched hybrid of Arabic and German.
Here’s Dalaa singing a song in Arabic about a father bringing home a balloon (that the child pops). She needs her mother's help to recall the words.
And here she is again counting in German (she struggles to count in Arabic).
Rafat sees Dalaa as his eventual successor as household manager of their immigrant household. “She will be the real German,” he says. “She’s forgetting Arabic, and when she starts primary school she will forget it even more. She already speaks German with a nearly perfect accent.”
Dalaa doesn’t remember much about Syria. If she hears the name (in Arabic, SOO-riyah), she only says “tak-tak-tak” — the sound of machine-gun fire.
This depresses her parents, who tear up when singing Marcel Khalife songs and like to tell vivid stories about family barbecues and wedding celebrations before the war.
"She never lived the good times in Damascus," says Nesrine, Wisam’s wife (see photo below, as she takes over my microphone). "But we did. And even after losing everything, we can’t un-live them. It is so lonely and quiet in Germany, so these old, familiar memories make me feel safe and like myself."
When I asked Dalaa if she wanted to return to Syria, she was firm:
NEIN.
Then she rushed to her mother, leading her to an inflatable pink unicorn house her father had gotten her at a discount store. Mother and daughter snuggled inside.
