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In My Mother's Footsteps
- A Palestinian Refugee Returns Home
- Narrated by: Lameece Issaq
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
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By: Ariel Sabar
Publisher's Summary
1948, Jerusalem. Zakia is forced to flee the only home she’s ever known as war rips through the leafy streets and the bustling spice-filled souqs. Taking just one suitcase, Zakia thinks she’ll be able to return soon. But within weeks, she realizes she won’t be allowed back to her beloved homeland.
2007, California. Mona grew up with her mother Zakia’s memories of Palestine, imagining the muezzin’s call for prayer and the medley of church bells her mother so vividly described to her. So, when Mona gets the opportunity to teach conflict resolution in Ramallah, she also embarks on a personal pilgrimage to find her mother’s home in militarized and occupied Jerusalem.
With cherished letters from her mother who writes to Mona regularly, sharing her story of Jerusalem, Mona dreams of one day being guided by her through the winding cobblestone alleys of the Old City. Yet it is Mona who instead holds her mother’s hand as they finally visit Jerusalem together. After 59 years of exile, her mother is returning to the place she once called home – but can a lifetime of loss ever be healed?
A moving and heartbreaking journey of a daughter discovering her Palestinian roots and recovering her mother’s beloved past. It’s also an intimate and tender account of daily life for Palestinians as never seen before. Perfect for fans of The Bookseller of Kabul and The Beekeeper of Aleppo.
Critic Reviews
"Utterly heart-breaking, absorbing, and tender...will stay with you long after you finish the last page." (Christy Lefteri, best-selling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo)
"An intimately detailed and moving account of what’s lost and found when human beings are displaced." (Sahar Mustafah, author of The Beauty of Your Face, a 2020 New York Times Notable Book)
More from the same
What listeners say about In My Mother's Footsteps
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Concerned American
- 07-17-22
Thank you Mona Hajjar Halaby!
This is a beautiful story of one family’s journey before and after the Palestine Nakba. Not only is it a well written and narrated book but it also is an accurate historical account of the important events in the history of the Middle East region.
I enjoyed and learned a lot from the class meeting sessions that teach conflict resolution strategies and stimulating self awareness amongst our youths.
I wish more Palestinians can put their stories into similar works of art!
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- Dale
- 10-27-21
Worth the credit
After reading this true story, I have a new empathy for the Palestinian people. I highly recommend it.
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- MomofTwins
- 09-09-21
A Beautiful Memoir
I loved everything about this memoir. From the relationships between Mother & Daughter, Husband & Wife, Teacher & Student and everything in between ... to hearing the rich history of Palestine ... to grieving over the loss of home & country for so many. This memoir was honest and sincere and connected me to a time and place I otherwise knew little about. Thank you for capturing the stories that need to be remembered!
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- karen
- 09-19-21
Interesting. I didn’t know all this
I listened to this book but I can’t remember why I chose it. It’s basically the life of a Palestinian family who were forced to leave their home when the country of Israel was created in 1948. I actually had no real understanding of the history of this area, only hearing of constant trouble in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem etc in my lifetime. Hearing from the Palestinian perspective was eye opening. I feel I have been educated as the author explains in detail what happened and was is perceived to have happened to the natives, the inhabitants snd the Jewish newcomers after WW2 and right up to the present day.
2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-06-21
In mothers footsteps
Absolutely brilliant. Loved listening to this all of it. Voice crystal clear recommend it. Story was touching in everyway
1 person found this helpful
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Story
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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House on Endless Waters
- A Novel
- By: Emuna Elon
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to promote his books, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Historical Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon footage portraying prewar Dutch Jewry and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with his father, his older sister…and an infant he doesn’t recognize.
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Interesting, worth the listen, but not great.
- By Npleaf on 02-11-20
By: Emuna Elon
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Aftershocks
- By: Nadia Owusu
- Narrated by: Nadia Owusu
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was 13.
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Struggled with author’s writing style
- By AF on 06-22-21
By: Nadia Owusu
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The Road from Raqqa
- A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and Belonging
- By: Jordan Ritter Conn
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Alkasem brothers, Riyad and Bashar, spend their childhood in Raqqa, the city that would later became the capital of ISIS. As a teenager in the 1980s, Riyad witnesses the devastating aftermath of the Hama massacre - an atrocity by the Assad regime. Wanting to expand his notion of government and justice, Riyad moves to the US to study law, but his plans are derailed and he eventually falls in love with a Southern belle. Bashar, meanwhile, stayed in Syria and embarked on a brilliant legal career under the same corrupt Assad government that Riyad despised.
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Gripping & Meaningful
- By Amazon Customer on 09-04-20
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From Miniskirt to Hijab
- A Girl in Revolutionary Iran
- By: Jacqueline Saper
- Narrated by: Vaneh Assadourian
- Length: 6 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At 18 she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in prerevolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community - primarily the disparate religions and cultures.
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Very good
- By Matt on 11-10-21
By: Jacqueline Saper
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Black Is the Body
- Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine
- By: Emily Bernard
- Narrated by: Emily Bernard
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In these 12 deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up Black in the South with a family name inherited from a White man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a White man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily White New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it.
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Beautifully written
- By caradaya on 08-10-19
By: Emily Bernard
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Better to Have Gone
- Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
- By: Akash Kapur
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East-Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright. So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone.
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Narcissists go hungry in India
- By ET on 07-26-21
By: Akash Kapur
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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
- A Memoir and a Reckoning
- By: Alex Halberstadt
- Narrated by: Alex Halberstadt
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.
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some depth and some historical narration
- By turgan@monomood.com on 09-21-21
By: Alex Halberstadt
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Floating in a Most Peculiar Way
- A Memoir
- By: Louis Chude-Sokei
- Narrated by: Louis Chude-Sokei
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles - a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story.
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Many memorable nuggets
- By Todd on 04-22-22
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The Words of My Father
- Love and Pain in Palestine
- By: Yousef Bashir
- Narrated by: Yousef Bashir
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A Palestinian American activist recalls his adolescence in Gaza during the Second Intifada and how he made a strong commitment to peace in the face of devastating brutality in this moving, candid, and transformative memoir that reminds us of the importance of looking beyond prejudice, anger, and fear.
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Loved this book
- By debby brooks on 09-09-21
By: Yousef Bashir
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Go, Went, Gone
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, “one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation” (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates.
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I loved everything about this book
- By Joan L. Machlis on 12-07-20
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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A Drop of Midnight
- A Memoir
- By: Jason Diakité, Rachel Willson-Broyles - translator
- Narrated by: Jason Diakité
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds - part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.
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Incredible Personal Narrative
- By Commoncent$ on 08-01-20
By: Jason Diakité, and others
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Out of Hiding
- A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey to America
- By: Ruth Gruener
- Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
- Length: 3 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Ruth Gruener was a hidden child during the Holocaust. At the end of the war, she and her parents were overjoyed to be free. But their struggles as displaced people had just begun. In war-ravaged Europe, they waited for paperwork for a chance to come to America. Once they arrived in Brooklyn, they began to build a new life but spoke little English. Ruth started at a new school and tried to make friends - but continued to fight nightmares and flashbacks of her time during World War II.
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Fantastic!
- By Rebecca Wilbern on 02-11-21
By: Ruth Gruener