Salt Houses

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan (2017) told the story of one Palestinian family over multiple generations, beginning in the late 1960s through the 2010s, centered around Alia and her husband Asif, who is best friends with Alia’s brother Mustafa.

Alia and Mustafa’s mother is forced to leave with the Six-Day War in 1967, and Mustafa and Asif become involved with a political movement out of their control. They are jailed and only one is release, never the same. And Alia and Asif move to Beirut, where they raise their three children–a serious, religious daughter, dutiful son, and youngest daughter, Souad, who is just like her mother, Alia, with the result that the house is often in tumult. Asif writes letters to his best friend to deal with the grief of losing him and losing his home.

Souad is away in Paris when disaster strikes again, and Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, and Alia and Asif have to leave. Again. With Souad miles and miles away, how can they ever be reunited?

The writing is beautiful–it is clear that the author is also a poet. I don’t recall anything specifically anti-fat, although there is emphasis on how Alia has maintained her figure over the years.

The younger two children settle in Boston, and so the family is only together rarely as Alia and Asif’s grandchildren get older. And they do come together, to help their grandmother remember when she can no longer. And Asif’s letters become a treasure, giving the grandchildren, raised in the United States, information that their parents didn’t even know.

I picked Salt Houses specifically in November 2023 to read something by a Palestinian author because of what continues to happen in Palestine. All people deserve a home and deserve to not be driven from it over and over.

The same could have been said about Jews a century or two ago. I know that I would not be here today if my Jewish ancestors hadn’t left Lithuania around 1900, but they should not have felt that leaving was their only choice. It was, in fact, their best choice, since 90% of Jews in Lithuania were murdered by Germans, one of the highest victim rates in Europe.

I don’t understand how what’s happening in Palestine isn’t seen as the same thing.