It began with a three-year-old, her son Ariel, when Claudette Sutton realized the need she shared with parents like herself for an information source about services and activities for children in her hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since then, the newsletter she founded to meet that need has grown into an award-winning quarterly newspaper that has been expanding its scope and contribution to the local community for almost twenty years. That interest in children and families would surprise no one who knew the close-knit world of Syrian Jews she had grown up in, a people whose loyalty and concern for each other had helped preserve their culture over thousands of years and a twentieth-century transplanting across continents. It was an odyssey that had begun for the Sutton family on the day in Aleppo, Syria, when her grandfather decided that safety in the face of rising anti-Semitism required him to "export his sons," beginning with the oldest, Claudette's father, Mike. Decades later, when Dad asked her to "help me get my story down on paper," she was honored and eager. The interest in families that she had felt all her life and the experience as a writer nurtured since her first reporting job as a teen-ager now have come together in the creation of Farewell, Aleppo. With skill and passion, combining thorough research with multiple interviews and first-hand knowledge, Claudette tells both her own father's unique story and the captivating larger tale of how a people once battered by history have in the end survived and thrived.
"... a stirring tribute to the foresight of Sutton's grandfather
and the strength and perseverance of his offspring." -- Jeff
Friend, Foreword Reviews
"A treasure of a book." -- Bernard Kalb, former NYT correspondent
CBS News, NBC News, and Assistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs
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