Was A Thanksgiving Miracle In Store?

As we prepped a 14-pound bird meant just for the two of us, the holiday in which we count our blessings became one in which anxiety hovered.

We awaited news from far away that would provide either another reason to rue 2020 or show this dark world a light yet shines. And so, as the wine poured and cranberries cooked, our thoughts turned to Erie, Pennsylvania.

To understand the reason, allow me to take you back to the spring of 2017.

Discouraged over the election of Donald Trump and his ban on Muslim immigrants, and eager to do something to respond in some helpful fashion, my wife Suzanne and I signed up to be cultural companions to a new refugee family through New Haven’s Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS).

Each set of volunteers was assigned one case, with the standard of spending six months with their families, introducing them to their new country, and providing emotional support. In our case, six months turned into nearly four years, and immeasurable amounts of illumination and heartbreak.

On April 17, 2017, accompanied by an IRIS interpreter and representative, we met Haitham Dalati and his wife Shiyam Daghestani at their apartment on Central Avenue in Westville. As it turned out, we needed no interpreter, as Haitham, then in his early 60s, was fluent in English, the result of having spent his boyhood on compounds of British oil companies in the Middle East.

Suzanne and I instantly took to our new friends – he because of his engaging humor and storytelling, and she because, though at the time she could say only a few English words, her generous eyes, warm hugs and rich lentil soup indicated her gratefulness.

Their story already had been one of epic displacement. Their home had been Damascus, and they had a weekend villa in the countryside, in the town where Shiyam’s relatives, mostly from Russia, had emigrated to decades earlier. Haitham had rewarding work for more than 20 years as a lab technician in health clinics in both Syria and Saudi Arabia.

The Syrian civil war, which started in 2011, reduced their homes and personal circumstances to rubble. They, along with their daughter Farah, her husband, and their four children. took refuge in nearby Lebanon, which at the time welcomed such refugees.

Soon, they were all on the list to come to America through the United Nations program to aid such legal immigrants. They had their papers; they had their medical tests; they had their airline reservations. But that’s where the problem became one of personal despair, a consequence of bigotry. 

Haitham and Shiyam boarded a commercial jet in Beirut headed for New York city. Farah and her family were to follow a few days later. But then President Trump’s ban on Muslim refugees, originally known by its benign designation, Executive Order 13769, went into effect. They were stranded.

In the experience of IRIS, among other things, this was novel. To have such a split happen in such heart-rending fashion had not happened before, and usually the younger people come first, establish residency, and help the older ones accommodate to a new culture. 

Both Haitham and Shiyam were hopeful that somehow the ban would be lifted. Over the next few months, as we met them each Saturday for lunch or for an outing in New Haven, we kept that hope alive. They had to make do with Skype calls to Tripoli, where Farah’s family lived, during which Shiyam always broke down in sobs.

Haitham told me of a conversation with his grandson, Abdulsalam, whom everyone calls Aboudi, five years old at the time. ​“He said, ​‘You promised me you would take me to America. You have broken that promise. Grandfather, I will never trust you again.’”

After a piece I wrote about them appeared in the Independent, NPR interviewed Haitham, who said, ​“This is so horrible for us that I don’t know if America is good or bad.”

Haitham’s difficulty was also professional. There was no way to get work in a health lab: He would need to get recertified, a process that would take a long time, and would not guarantee employment, needed work here.

IRIS offered to support such studies, but Haitham declined, and the organization set up other interviews. He found some work, well below his qualifications. None lasted very long, for various reasons.

A crisis occurred when Haitham lifted a case of stemware at Whitney Place, and he felt pain in his shoulder, and subsequently couldn’t lift his right arm in normal fashion. Shiyam, too, suffered from a series of health issues. No doubt these were exacerbated by emotional stress.

Meantime, IRIS had stretched its modest budget to help, and had also invited Shiyam to take English classes. Even so, the subsidies were running out. The $1,200 per month rental payment would soon be Haitham and Shiyam’s responsibility, with no help and no job.

The separation was beginning to look permanent. Haitham and Shiyam were not permitted to return to Lebanon, as they had signed papers when they left that banned them from doing so. Besides, as new immigrants they had no American passports, and had to await Green Card status to get them. The family in Lebanon also had no passports, theirs destroyed in the war.

Over our lunches and meetings, Suzanne and I tried to keep their spirits up. Often Haitham and Shiyam turned the tables. Shiyam, made us the food that she made for her family. The table was always covered with plates of food, walnut hummus, baby eggplants, preserved in olive oil, lentil soup, fattoush, halal chicken, pockets of pita and pastries so sweet and beautiful our teeth hurt.

When we were leaving to go home, the plastic containers came out with food for us for the week. She practiced her English phrases on us. It was rudimentary, not much beyond beginner’s, but her pronunciation was perfect when she said, ​“Thank you very much,” and ​“Oh, my God,” which she said both in moments of joy and despair, the latter when she would remove her glasses and wipe her eyes.

Whenever we could convince them that it was our turn to treat, we took them often to RAWA, the restaurant in Westville owned and operated by Middle East refugees. These gatherings always affected Suzanne and me in deep ways, and on our ride home we vowed to try harder to help.

We contacted everyone we know in national government, including our Congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro, for help. They did what they could, but the Dalati’s timing was unique. Confronting the ban was a David and Goliath situation. One thing we could add as a small but delectable tidbit was that now Haitham Dalati was, at least in our lingo, Professor Haitham Dalati, tutoring a Yale student from New York City who yearned to learn Arabic. 

In their Skype conversations with family in Lebanon, apparently young Aboudi had switched from bitterness to hatching a plan. He told his grandfather, ​“Can you give me the telephone number of President Trump? I will call him. I think he must like children.”

But the family situation deteriorated in Tripoli. Work permits were taken away from all immigrants, and the besieged government hatched a plan to send all such newcomers back to Syria where they could face mortal consequences.

We hoped that we could provide some comfort, even if part of it would be through efforts that might make our friends uncomfortable. Often, our conversations drifted into delicate areas. Haitham told us, in response to his questions about our own backgrounds, that his father had once warned him that, ​“If you should see a Jew, he will kill you.”

Indeed, Suzanne and I appeared to be the first Jews that the couple had ever become close to. So in January 2018, we invited them to come with us to a

Shabbat service at our synagogue in Chester. This, we knew, would be a huge departure from anything they knew or were comfortable with. Shiyam, who always wore traditional Muslim clothing, prays five times a day, and is meticulous about fasting during Ramadan.

Haitham, though lax in his religious practices, remains very much a believer, often peppering his hopes with ​“God willing,” and stating that he could bear any heartbreak in this world because he knows that in the next there will be redemption and joy.

We of course spread the news at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek of Haitham and Shiyam’s imminent arrival, and also invited Ashley Makar, from IRIS, to come with us, and to participate in a panel discussion after services to talk about the dire situations of such refugees, and how to respond.

During the worship service, Rabbi Marci Bellows welcomed our friends, and spoke about them, and invited me to the bimah to tell their story. A few minutes later, as the closing song was sung, Haitham put his arm around me and said, ​“We are so happy. Thank you so much.”

In turn, over time Haitham and Shiyam took us to various markets and places in West Haven where refugees from Asia and the Middle East buy food, and the boardwalk where they find comfort in the waters of Long Island Sound.

In the fall of 2019, quite unexpectedly, Haitham called with the news that they were leaving New Haven and heading to Erie. In that old industrial city on the lake with the same name, an emerging Syrian neighborhood was forming. Given that the city had fallen on hard times, it is much cheaper to live there as well (as low as $400 for monthly rent).

Haitham found a job there, temporarily, working for an Israeli couple who owned a food market. Shiyam, meanwhile, made new friends.

During one phone conversation, I asked Haitham how Shiyam was doing with her English. He said, ​“Most here can’t speak it, so she doesn’t get a chance. Compared to them, she is Shakespeare.”

Then came this conversation, one month ago: Haitham told us that Farah and her family were scheduled to be on a flight on Thanksgiving Eve to the United States. It turned out the federal government came through with visas after all.

But a part of us worried it would still never happen, that the Trump administration, amid a pandemic, would find a way to continue blocking their entry.

When Thanksgiving Eve came, Haitham texted us that Farah, her husband Wesam, and the four children were on a flight to Chicago, would stay there the night, and then come the following day to Erie. We heard nothing further, even as we stuffed that turkey down our gullets, and drank our Cabernet, and ate too much of a delicious apple pie made by Atticus.

Then the next morning, this: a video taken at the Erie airport. You can watch it above. It is, as you’ll see, not a professional job, and at first there is no way to see the faces, but in the end, it all comes through. Suzanne and I watched in tears. The kind of tears meant for Thanksgiving, ones of gratefulness, and some inner light that refuses to go out.