Syria

My heart is bleeding every day with what is going on in Syria, and Aleppo and Homs in particular, where I spent the nicest childhood and teenage days. Ever since things have started taking an uglier turn over the past months, I have lost all sense of joy and laughter, and I now find that life has no taste. A part of me is collapsing before my eyes, as I am watching (and sometimes even looking away) powerlessly. I lost an old uncle in Homs, family members were wounded, and most of my extended family has been displaced from Homs and now Aleppo; my grandfather’s house in the old Christian neighborhood of Hamidie in Homs has been reduced to rubble, and many of the places I grew up in no longer exist. For those of you who do not know Aleppo, it is the jewel on Syria’s crown, one of those rare and precious places like Rome, Paris, Istanbul or Fes in Morocco or Ispahan in Iran, which if destroyed, would bring down with it a sizable chunk of our collective human heritage.. it’s the oldest city in the world, a place where cultures have converged for millennia, where Arabs of…