Paul Bass Photo
The Dalatis Sunday in their Westville apartment.
The timing of Donald Trump’s travel ban has split a Syrian family between New Haven and Lebanon — only in this case it’s the grandparents who made it to the Promised Land, praying for a breakthrough so their beloved daughter and grandchildren can join them.
Meet Haitham Dalati and his wife Shiyam Daghestani. Their home and their lives destroyed by Syria’s civil war, they made it to the U.S. just as President Trump last year imposed a ban on travel from Muslim countries. The Dalatis’ daughter and grandchildren, who also had permission to come here, missed making it in before the ban by a week.
Through his synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek, and the refugee-assistance group IRIS, Lary Bloom and his wife Suzanne Levine have helped the Dalatis settle into new lives in Westville and try to bring the rest of the family here. Bloom and Levine introduced the family and the plight to the congregation this past Friday night at Shabbat services; following is an edited version of the talk Bloom gave.
We are here, in this sanctuary, a safe place for all. Here, tonight, we are tranquil. But for a moment, if you would, transport yourself to shores of Lebanon to a time last winter.
There we meet a family who fled Syrian chaos and murder. Let me introduce to you a man called Haitham, who for 20 years had worked as a medical lab technician back when life was orderly; his wife, Shiyam; their daughter and son-in-law, Farah and Wesam; and their four grandchildren, Leila, Haitham, Lamese and the precocious little one, the 5‑year-old boy called Abboudi.
The family endured much upheaval. Their home in the Syrian city called Homs, a once bustling industrial community of more than a half a million residents, was destroyed in the devastating civil war. Death was all around, inconsolability the common human condition.
Though the family escaped and found their own temporary sanctuary in Lebanon, all their worldly goods were lost, their livelihood destroyed, their future in grave doubt.
They had, however, a sign of hope. They had been cleared by authorities to enter the United States, in effect, the promised land, through a U.N. program, and then through the U.S. State Department, and then tended by the local relief not-for-profit organization called IRIS, short for Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Service, in New Haven.
The grandparents, Haitham and Shiyam, were given tickets for a commercial flight to New York; as was the usual practice, they would have to reimburse the sponsoring agency. They were told that the rest of the family would follow behind, in just a week or so.
But as if this story were a movie or a novel, here’s where the heartbreak multiplies.
A new president entered the White House in Washington D.C. Among his first acts was to ban travel for people trying to emigrate from Muslim countries.
For a great number of Americans, this news was shocking, something to rail about, but there was no intimate consequence. For families in the midst of this, it was suffocating news. Families such as that of Haitham and Shiyam’s.
They came to New Haven, unlike most refugee families, grandparents first. They are the oldest of IRIS clients, and unable to take up work as if they were 20-year-olds in at the peak of health. IRIS helped them get settled, found them an apartment on a city bus line. IRIS helped them in many other ways, including setting up English classes for Shiyam, as Haitham already speaks the language well, having worked as a young man on an oil pipeline for a British company.
And every day she and Haitham Skype to Lebanon, and every day tears are shed.
Little Abboudi told his grandfather, “You promised you would take me to America. You have broken that promise. Grandfather, I will never trust you again.”
Paul Bass Photo
The Dalatis Sunday in their Westville apartment.
In time, the boy learned that it is not his grandfather who is barring him from America, but the man in the White House. One day, Aboudi asked his grandfather, “Can you give me the telephone number of President Trump? I will call him. I think he must like children.”
Now the bit players arrived, myself and my wife Suzanne. Frustrated and angry about the 2016 election, we wanted to do more than grumble and write nasty Facebook posts. So we signed up with IRIS to be “cultural companions” to Haitham and Shiyam.
We began our work in April, with the promise of spring. Our job was to meet them once a week and to introduce them to life in America, the culture, the traditions, the practical matters of existence here. We were asked by IRIS, as with all cultural companions, not to get involved in other practical ways, but of course that is impossible.
Over the months we have become regular visitors to the apartment in Westville, and many times have enjoyed lunches made by Shiyam, an excellent cook who prepares tabouli, and hummus, and pickled eggplant that requires great patience and skill. She is always cheerful with us, though we know that her heart is breaking.
We took them to places. Lobster in Clinton. We took them to Mamoun’s in New Haven. Haitham, not a shy person, lectured the owner that his food could be more authentic. We took them tailgating before a Yale football game, and enjoyed our food, ironically, under the FBI tent.
We took them also to the Yale Art Gallery to show them that world-class collection but learned it was they who were going to show it to us. As fate would have it, that month the gallery was featuring a collection of ancient Syrian art. Haitham ended up explaining it all to us, proud of his heritage and a culture that had been known for centuries for its advancements.
Haitham is often distraught, saying if he had to do it over again, knowing what he knows now, and having endured the pain that he and his family have endured, he would have stayed in Lebanon.
And yet we have also seen from our perspective something intimate to us, a glimpse into what the immigrants in our own families faced generations ago when they felt they were strangers in a strange land. Here, they have been able to find community, a growing number of Syrian and Middle Eastern refugees who run businesses in West Haven, and a diverse community of immigrants from dozens of countries.
Haitham is a complicated man -– confident in what he knows, and skeptical about what he has read or heard. As a child, he heard the talk among the adults that Palestinians are rightful owners of the land now called Israel. But he had read the Koran, which records the history of Israelites, and he asked himself: What is true, and what is false? That question, what is true and what is false, is one that any thinking person dwells on, especially one trying to adjust to a new land, to a new culture, to hang on to what he knows, and to learn what he doesn’t.
He and I have found a certain kinship. During Ramadan, he confided that he isn’t the most observant of Muslims in terms of the fasting demands of the holiday. I confided in him that I consider the 24-hour-fast at Yom Kippur to be a bit excessive and have lobbied here at the synagogue to reduce the fast to 24 minutes, but have not been successful in that pursuit.
When Haitham was a small child, perhaps only 3 years old, before most of his eight brothers and sisters were born, his mother gave him an orange, and she kept one for herself. He ate his hurriedly, while she was still working on hers.
He asked, “May I have one piece of yours?” She began to cry, but not because she felt assaulted, ration-wise. She recognized something in her first born.
She gave him the whole orange. “Here, Haitham, you eat. I don’t like it.”
That wasn’t really the case. She was just passing along nourishment from generation to generation, the very job we undertake today.
Lary Bloom, the retired editor of Northeast Magazine, is the author or coauthor of several books including Lary Bloom’s Connecticut Notebook, Letters From Nuremberg (with Christopher J. Dodd), and The Test of Our Times (with Tom Ridge), and the upcoming biography, Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas. He lives in the East Rock neighborhood.
Click on or download the audio file or Facebook Live video below to listen to a recent episode of WNHH radio’s “Chai Haven” program about the revival of Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek.
