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"A woman sat across from me, describing the life she left behind in a few careful sentences. I recognized something in her story from the one my family has been telling me over the course of my life. This recognition is the reason I am fascinated by immigration.
We live in tumultuous times, where the topic of immigration is highly controversial. Yet I connect the memories of my family’s history of intergenerational trauma and escape to my personal experiences bringing my opinion to light: immigration should be open borders; immigrants should NOT be discriminated against.
My family has been living in diaspora for well over a century. My great-grandmother, Luba Bet-Alkhas, was a young woman in Russia in the late 1920s when the Russian Revolution’s aftermath made staying there impossible. She and her husband, my great-grandfather, Elisha, fled south, eventually settling in Urmia, a city in the Assyrian region of northwestern Iran. They built a life there.
In parallel, my paternal grandfather’s family fled the 1914–1918 genocide that the Ottoman Empire carried out against Assyrians, Armenians and the Greeks. When the Ottomans invaded Iran to massacre and ethnically cleanse Assyrians in Urmia and its surrounding villages, the women and children in my grandfather’s family fled to the British refugee camps built in Baghdad (in current-day Iraq), while the men joined an Assyrian regiment fighting the Ottoman army alongside the British, who had promised the Assyrians that if they helped the British defeat the Ottomans, they would have a homeland of their own. World War I ended, and the British reneged on their promise. Some of my grandfather’s family eventually made their way back home to Iran, though others stayed in Iraq. Either way, “home” became a concept with more than one answer."
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SABRINA BET-MANSOUR
