Narratively

I have learned all the stories my father was too protective of me to share, parsed the conflicting histories and studied the maps. Now I can finally recreate our family’s lost home, in a once small village in Palestine.

He was a hometown hero who died at war days before I was born. He haunted my life, until I finally made the trip to see where he fell.

In this time of Islamophobia and hatred, I needed to understand what made a white stranger open her home to us.

For most of our history, the U.S. government treated biracial Americans as if we didn’t even exist, but my family has stories to tell.

We grew up idolizing grandpa for surviving death marches and beating up Germans, but grandma was always just, well...a sweet old lady. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

I was just ten when my father passed, long before the Internet. But giving him a digital footprint paid off more than I could have ever anticipated.