8vo. xx, 293 pp. frontispiece, b/w illustrations, translated from Arabic by Mazen Naous, publisher’s original wrappers, index, Folios Limited, London and Beirut, 2022.

Synopsis

This is the first English translation of the memoirs of Juliette Elmir Sa’adeh (1909–1976), the iconic Syrian social nationalist, activist, and reformer, and the first woman political prisoner in Syria. As the role of women in politics and armed conflict in Lebanon and Syria continues to garner wide-ranging attention, these memoirs fill a historical gap and provide a detailed account of earlier periods of political turmoil from a woman’s perspective. Spanning the famine in Lebanon during World War I through Elmir Sa’adeh’s unjust imprisonment in Syria (1955–1963), the memoirs reveal a remarkable life of conviction and struggle. These memoirs received much acclaim after their initial publication in Arabic and they went through multiple reprints. Now they can reach Anglophone readers as an important resource for the political history of Lebanon and Syria in the twentieth century.